As Obsession, a micro-budget horror made by a YouTuber, continues to overperform with critics and audiences, and as another twentysomething content creator prepares to break a potential record with the release of Backrooms, here comes a stodgy by-the-book Paramount horror that feels like someone’s embarrassing dad just gatecrashed a college party. While others might be trying to innovate, those involved with Paramount’s generic schedule-filler Passenger are perfectly content to keep things lazily trucking along as they always have. Even if it wasn’t stuck in an unfortunate gen Z genre sandwich, it’d still be a struggle to see why anyone would want to hitch a ride with this one.

Like February’s cursed misfire Psycho Killer, another junky on-the-road studio horror, Passenger plays like something that would have gone straight to unrated DVD back in the 2000s. It’s marginally better but similarly baffling that with all of the unproduced horror scripts stacking up on desks in Hollywood, this would not only make it to production but be warranted a wide release on a prime May weekend. I kept waiting to understand what might have nudged this one to the top of the pile, but left without clarity.

It’s perhaps a tagline-first pitch that sold it, as the poster does offer up a decently creepy statistic: 130 million people take road trips every year. 15,400 of them are never seen again. It may not be true, but it’s a neat jumping-off point for a scary movie, the latest in a long line of road-set nightmares, the particularly desolate enormity of the US allowing for an effective feeling of anything-could-happen vulnerability. Your vehicle becomes your safe space and in Passenger, a van becomes that and more for a couple attempting a new nomadic existence. But Tyler (British actor Jacob Scipio) is a little more enthused about this new #VanLife direction than his girlfriend Maddie (Foundation’s Lou Llobell), and when living out of a vehicle starts to wear thin (the script needed to build this incremental tension way more), they find themselves afflicted by some sort of demonic presence.

Thanks to both the hobo code (a set of symbols left by travellers to help those who follow) and a cheque-collecting Oscar-winner (Melissa Leo in thankless exposition mode), they figure out that their van has become marked as unsafe. Think Nomadland meets It Follows.

But the half-assed mythology of the film is far too murky and the rules involved far too underwritten, and so when we should be immersed in the tension and horror of the moment, we’re too busy raising our hand to ask questions. Norwegian director André Øvredal, who last stumbled with messy Dracula spin-off The Last Voyage of the Demeter, is primarily focused on making us jump, his film an often exhausting string of obviously telegraphed moments rather than a complete story. Despite this, I found them all disappointingly ineffective and increasingly annoying, loud lurches of sound and flashes of a rubbery big bad failing to pull me out of my bored back-of-seat slump.

The only mildly jolting sequence is the cold open, setting up a previous haunting with two friends, something the marketing team was clearly aware of, having essentially shown it in full in the first teaser trailer. It’s downhill from there, as we’re stuck with an anonymously written couple we struggle to root for as they face off with an antagonist we struggle to understand. The rough draft script, from Zachary Donohue and TW Burgess, never upgrades our leads from pawns to people and Øvredal, while more competent than most, isn’t able to either capture the claustrophobia of the van or the terrifying expanse of what surrounds them. We’re never really thrust on to the road with the film, occupying a seat alongside them. Instead, we’re stuck half-watching from afar, dozing our way through a journey that takes us, and the horror genre at large, back rather than forward.

• Passenger is out in Australian cinemas on 21 May and in the UK and US on 22 May