The opening minutes of Passenger suggest that André Øvredal might have found another wonderfully confined nightmare.

A couple comes across a gruesome accident on an isolated stretch of highway. The darkness is oppressive, the road seemingly endless and the wreckage offers just enough information to make us suspicious of what we are seeing. Something is wrong. Something is watching. And when the couple eventually realise that whatever was responsible for the accident has followed them, Passenger briefly becomes the kind of lean, atmospheric horror film that Øvredal has demonstrated an instinct for before.

It is a particularly tantalising beginning from the director of The Autopsy of Jane Doe, a film that understood how to extract extraordinary tension from a restricted space and an increasingly disturbing mystery.

Unfortunately, Passenger spends much of the journey trying to find its way back to that opening.

What begins as a potentially unnerving supernatural road movie gradually becomes a predictable procession of demonic appearances, mythology dumps and familiar jump scares. The highway offers isolation, movement and endless possibility, but the film increasingly feels as though it is travelling in circles.

There is a good horror film trapped somewhere inside Passenger.

Unfortunately, it never quite gets out.

The Road Less Interesting

The premise is undeniably appealing.

Maddie and Tyler have embraced van life, leaving behind their previous existence to travel across America. The open road is supposed to represent freedom, escape and reinvention. Instead, after stopping at the scene of a horrific accident, their journey becomes a nightmare from which they cannot simply drive away.

There is something inherently cinematic about horror on the highway.

The road is a liminal space. It connects places without belonging to any of them. It can be empty for miles, leaving travellers isolated from help. At night, the world is reduced to headlights, darkness and whatever might be waiting beyond the reach of the beams.

Cinema has exploited that anxiety for decades, from Duel and The Hitcher to Jeepers Creepers and countless other variations on the idea that stopping on the wrong stretch of road can have consequences.

Passenger has all the ingredients.

What it doesn’t always have is the imagination to make them feel new.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe Effect

This is perhaps what makes the film most frustrating.

André Øvredal has already demonstrated how good he can be at turning limited environments into engines of suspense. The Autopsy of Jane Doe remains such an effective piece of horror because its mystery is allowed to accumulate gradually. A seemingly straightforward situation becomes progressively stranger, and the physical limitations of the morgue make escape increasingly difficult.

Passenger initially seems to promise a similar experience.

The van becomes the new morgue.

The highway becomes the new enclosed chamber.

The darkness outside becomes something unknowable.

But rather than allowing that uncertainty to breathe, the film increasingly explains itself.

And once the Passenger stops being a mysterious presence and becomes a set of supernatural rules, the film loses much of its power.

The Monster Is Better Before We Meet Him

The Passenger himself is a potentially effective horror creation.

There is something inherently unsettling about the figure that appears at the roadside. The idea of a supernatural entity attached to travellers and accidents has a folkloric quality that could have given the film a genuinely sinister identity.

The problem is that the more the film explains him, the less frightening he becomes.

Mystery is often the most valuable currency in supernatural horror.

What is that thing?

Why is it there?

What does it want?

What happens if we encounter it?

Passenger answers these questions with increasing enthusiasm.

And each answer diminishes the fear.

The entity eventually feels less like an unknowable evil stalking the highway and more like a horror villain operating according to a list of rules that the screenplay has conveniently provided for us.

The mythology may explain the Passenger.

It doesn’t make him more interesting.

The Hobo Code

The film attempts to build its mythology around the idea of signs and symbols used by travellers and outsiders, incorporating religious folklore and what is presented as a “hobo code” into the supernatural history of the Passenger.

There is an intriguing film hiding inside this idea.

The highway is already filled with stories. Missing people, roadside memorials, abandoned buildings, forgotten towns and travellers who never reached their destinations could have provided the foundation for something genuinely folkloric.

Instead, the mythology often feels like exposition arriving to explain what the audience should already have been allowed to fear.

The film’s greatest mistake is not that its mythology is too complicated.

It is that the mythology is less interesting than the mystery it replaces.

When the Road Becomes a Formula

The early sections of Passenger understand the importance of anticipation.

A figure glimpsed in the distance is more effective than a monster standing in full view.

A strange movement outside the van can be more unsettling than a sudden attack.

The darkness beyond the headlights is more frightening when we don’t know what might be inside it.

Øvredal occasionally demonstrates that understanding.

But too often the film opts for the easier route.

Something appears.

The music rises.

The camera moves.

The jump scare arrives.

Repeat.

The result is a horror film that increasingly telegraphs its intentions. Even the more effective sequences can feel as though they have been constructed around the expectation that the audience will know exactly when to brace themselves.

That is particularly disappointing coming from Øvredal.

His earlier work demonstrated a much greater patience with dread.

The Van Life Nightmare

There is also a missed opportunity in the film’s treatment of van life.

The idea of two people abandoning conventional domesticity for a life on the road should provide an extraordinary horror setting.

The van is simultaneously home and prison.

It offers freedom but little security.

It can take you anywhere, but once something gets inside, there is nowhere to hide.

That contradiction is terrific.

Yet Passenger doesn’t exploit it as deeply as it could.

The van becomes primarily a plot device rather than an extension of the characters’ psychological lives.

And that makes the road trip feel strangely anonymous.

The film could have explored what it means to voluntarily abandon the security of a permanent home only to discover that the open road offers no sanctuary.

Instead, the van largely becomes another location for the next supernatural encounter.

A Couple We Don’t Quite Know

The relationship between Maddie and Tyler also struggles to provide the emotional foundation the film needs.

A supernatural road movie becomes considerably more frightening when we care about the people who cannot escape the road.

But Maddie and Tyler remain somewhat thinly drawn.

Their relationship is functional enough to move the plot forward, but the film doesn’t give us enough sense of what makes them compelling as a couple before the nightmare begins.

That matters because Passenger is ultimately a story about two people trapped together.

The horror should test the relationship.

Instead, the relationship sometimes feels as though it is simply there to populate the horror.

The performances are capable, but the material doesn’t give them enough to work with.

The Promise of Øvredal

There are flashes of the film Passenger could have been.

A handful of visual ideas are genuinely striking. The nighttime sequences occasionally create an effective sense of spatial uncertainty, while Øvredal’s camera can still find interesting ways of turning apparently familiar locations into threatening environments.

One particularly inventive sequence involving a projected film spilling across the surrounding forest demonstrates the director’s ability to create imagery that is genuinely strange and memorable.

These moments remind us that the problem isn’t a lack of technical ability.

Øvredal can make a horror film look good.

He can stage a scare.

He can create atmosphere.

He can establish a threatening environment.

What Passenger lacks is a screenplay capable of consistently matching those instincts.

A Journey to Nowhere

The longer the film continues, the more its initial promise begins to evaporate.

The road should create momentum.

Instead, the narrative begins to drift.

The mystery should deepen.

Instead, it is explained.

The Passenger should become more frightening.

Instead, familiarity sets in.

And the relationship at the centre of the story should become more emotionally involving.

Instead, the characters remain largely where we found them.

This is where the film’s 94-minute running time begins to feel longer than it actually is.

There is a strange contradiction at the heart of Passenger: the film is never particularly long, but it feels as though it is taking a very long time to arrive anywhere.

It is a road movie without much sense of discovery.

The Horror of Predictability

Predictability is particularly damaging to horror because fear depends upon uncertainty.

Once the audience understands the rhythm, the tension begins to drain away.

We know the Passenger will appear.

We know someone will investigate.

We know the darkness will conceal something.

We know the characters will discover another piece of mythology.

And we know that the next scare is likely to arrive just when the soundtrack becomes suspiciously quiet.

There are still moments that work.

But they become isolated jolts rather than part of a sustained atmosphere of dread.

The film’s strongest scare may actually be its opening because, at that point, Passenger hasn’t yet told us what kind of film it is.

It simply lets us be afraid.

A Film Out of Time

Perhaps the strangest thing about Passenger is how contemporary its premise feels and how familiar its execution feels.

The horror landscape has become increasingly adventurous in recent years, with filmmakers finding fresh ways to approach supernatural folklore, body horror, psychological terror and genre hybridity.

Against that backdrop, Passenger feels unusually conventional.

That doesn’t automatically make a film bad.

There is nothing wrong with making a straightforward supernatural horror movie.

But straightforward doesn’t have to mean predictable.

Passenger occasionally seems satisfied with reproducing horror mechanics that other films have already used more effectively.

Its greatest sin isn’t that it is old-fashioned.

It’s that it doesn’t seem particularly interested in doing anything with being old-fashioned.

A Road Trip That Never Reaches Its Destination

The frustration with Passenger comes down to that central contradiction.

There is so much potential in the premise.

A demonic entity stalking people on America’s lonely highways.

A young couple living permanently on the road.

A vehicle that functions simultaneously as home, refuge and trap.

A folklore of missing travellers and roadside death.

An experienced horror filmmaker behind the camera.

That should be enough to make something memorable.

And there are glimpses of it.

But Passenger gradually abandons its strongest qualities in favour of increasingly familiar supernatural-horror territory.

The highway becomes generic.

The mythology becomes explanatory.

The scares become predictable.

The characters remain underdeveloped.

And the Passenger, who should be the film’s great nightmare invention, becomes increasingly ordinary.

The Prognosis:

Passenger is a disappointing film precisely because André Øvredal has already shown us how much better he can do.

There is real promise in its opening, where the combination of an isolated highway, a mysterious accident and an unseen supernatural presence creates the possibility of a genuinely unsettling road nightmare. For a brief period, the film seems to understand that the most frightening thing about travelling through darkness is not knowing what might be waiting beyond the headlights.

But Passenger cannot resist turning that uncertainty into explanation.

The further it travels, the more predictable the journey becomes.

What could have been a lean, atmospheric supernatural road horror instead becomes a collection of familiar scares and increasingly cumbersome mythology. The film isn’t without craft, and Øvredal occasionally finds an image or sequence capable of reminding us of the filmmaker who gave us The Autopsy of Jane Doe.

Those flashes make the disappointment sharper.

Because the film begins with the promise of a destination worth reaching.

Instead, it spends too much of its journey travelling the same stretch of road.

Passenger isn’t a complete disaster.

It’s something more frustrating.

It’s a horror film with a great road, a promising monster and a director capable of considerably more — and somehow it still manages to feel like we’ve been here before.

• Saul Muerte