André Øvredal’s Passenger, both as a supernatural highway movie and as a B-reel curse placed on the Pinterest-board fantasy of van life, arrives with a deceptively elegant horror question: what happens when the haunted house has wheels and a composting toilet? It opens wide in theaters Friday, May 22, 2026, sending Lou Llobell and Jacob Scipio onto the road as a couple who mistake escape for protection, then discover that the thing waiting out there has been traveling much longer than they have.

My full review is below, with significant spoilers.

Passenger: full review

Passenger is at its sharpest before it starts explaining itself. The cold open initially plays like good, blunt horror business: random people in a car, a back-road panic chamber, the audience dropped into somebody else’s nightmare with no promise that these people matter beyond the violence about to happen to them. Then the film does something smarter. It gives that opening continuity. The terror is transferable. One of the strangers at the beginning is not disposable so much as infectious, carrying the Passenger (a la It Follows) until his collision with Maddie (Llobell) and Tyler (Scibio) moves the curse into a new vehicle, a new romance, a new dream about escape. The revolving camera planted in the center of the car gives the sequence a genuinely novel claustrophobia: faces, windows, dashboard, bodies, road, faces again, everything turning in place while the vehicle keeps moving forward. It makes the car feel less like transportation than a sealed organ.

That is the movie’s best idea in miniature. Van life sells itself as escape with better lighting, domesticity unbolted from rent and routine. Passenger takes one look at that fantasy and spits in the dirt, sneers: Sure—take the house on the road. It can still be haunted.

Horror is always at its most sacrilegious when it understands the temple. A house, a marriage, a church, a body, a family, a car with a bed in the back and a view of the stars—anything can become sacred enough to profane. Mobile living gives the genre a fresh frontier, because the van is supposed to solve the problem of being trapped. Øvredal’s nastiest joke is that movement can become its own enclosure.

The Passenger himself is a demonic hitchhiker with folkloric patience, a road entity that can bend perception until escape becomes choreography. His victims do not simply die. They are arranged for death, hallucinating toward the center of the road, kneeling, arms out, made into a cross for whatever hungry thing has been traveling behind them. The movie keeps returning to the moral insult of that image. Tyler and Maddie think running from one life gives them armor. They have left jobs, apartments, the grid, the whole suffocating architecture of what they knew. Then the road answers with an older architecture: signs, codes, lights, woods, possession, sacrifice.

Øvredal has fun with the grammar of light. Blinkers and hazards become little metronomes for dread, chopping the darkness into intervals, speeding it up, slowing it down, making terror feel timed by machinery. A car’s emergency lights should mean help is possible. Here they become a pulse. That is where Passenger often looks better than it talks. The film understands how headlights can flatten the world, how woods become theatrical when illuminated in strips, how a parking lot at night can feel like an ocean with painted lines. Maddie using a projector as a flashlight in the woods is the sort of elegant horror image the movie needed more of: old cinema dragged through the trees, the beam turning the dark into something haunted twice over.

The best full sequence is the parking lot, where the van keeps getting away from Maddie with the cruel dream logic of Insidious. It is funny, frightening and beautifully irritating: the thing she needs is right there, then twenty feet farther, then gone again, the ordinary geometry of a lot turned into a prank by hell. The Passenger himself is referential in that familiar studio-horror way, all long-faced boogeyman business and antique menace, but he has some of the Sinister demon’s archival stink. The way Maddie and Ty uncover him has that slow-drip archaeological pleasure too: symbols, old accounts, half-translated warnings, the sense that evil has already been documented by people who died before they could finish the annotation. The hobo code material gives it a little Yellowjackets tingle as well, treating wilderness markings as spiritual intelligence, a way of reading danger scratched into the margins of civilization.

The movie also suffers from the curse of having a good trailer. One of its most horrific jump scares has already been spent before the audience even takes its seat, which leaves the actual film working to rebuild the voltage its own marketing discharged. Still, there are about five solid jolts in here, and they played. My theater jumped. That counts for something, especially in a May horror calendar that has already had Hokum and Obsession priming audiences for nasty little genre objects with personality. Passenger benefits from arriving in that bloodstream. It is essentially a very good straight-to-streaming horror film with a bigger budget, sexier cinematography and enough theatrical shock craft to justify the room.

The frustration is that a movie about a demon this patient has almost no patience of its own. There is a frustrating lack of stillness. Øvredal keeps moving the camera, moving the bodies, moving the plot, reaching for kinetic anxiety when some of the material cries out for downtempo dread. The Passenger has supposedly been waiting on roads, in codes, in whispered warnings and roadside deaths, yet the film often behaves as though silence might kill it. The camera is inventive in bursts, especially that cold open and a few spatially clever scare scenes, but the movie could have used more dead air: more empty asphalt, more black tree line, more stretches where the frame seems to be listening for something the characters cannot yet hear.

The human drama is thinner. Maddie’s hemming and hawing over Tyler’s proposal feels canned, and her sudden insistence that she wants to quit van-lifing because she wants to settle down and have a family lands like a conversation these two should have had long before the film began. The issue is not the conflict itself. Couples drag unspoken expectations into bad decisions all the time. The issue is the way the movie forces the dialogue to carry all the water because Maddie and Tyler rarely generate the lived-in chemistry that would let silence do any work. They sometimes feel like horror leads over-acting every exchange so the audience can understand the relationship mechanics the on-screen connection cannot express.

Tyler, for a long time, is the familiar brainless boyfriend who ignores every available sign, including the ones that practically arrive with underlining and a citation. The pleasant surprise is that Passenger eventually lets him buy into the terror instead of keeping him as dead weight. Once he understands the rules, he becomes useful in a blunt, satisfying horror-movie way, helping Maddie destroy the monster instead of standing around as masculinity with a driver’s license. That turn gives the back half more lift than expected. It turns his stupidity into a setup for some character growth, flat as it is.

The weaker material is exactly where the film reaches for emotional grandeur with both hands and drops half of it. The proposal, the leaving-lives-behind speeches, the wounded young-couple mythology of it all—too much of it plays like melodrama laminated onto a better horror mechanism. The acting mostly hovers around serviceable, sometimes stiff, occasionally warm enough to pass. The van-life gatherings are even stranger. The film clearly wants the romantic glow of the subculture—campfire community, beautiful rigs, people finding a life outside the big machine—but the music over those scenes is cloyingly bad, and the rendering of van life can feel so superficial it becomes faintly galling. Horror works best when it violates something the characters and the camera have made sacred. Passenger gestures at that sacredness without always earning it.

There is one scene where the whole thing nearly collapses into a video-game escort mission: Ty outside the car, leading Maddie through a maze of vehicles, calling directions through a space the movie has made less scary by making it too readable. It is excruciating because the film’s better sequences understand panic as spatial betrayal. That scene turns panic into navigation. It plays like a horror game tutorial where the controller batteries are dying.

Still, the core image holds. Passenger has a vicious little admonition: exodus is no guarantee of deliverance. Running from one life does not make the next one holy. The road trip, that great American fantasy of reinvention, becomes an altar with lane markings. Maddie and Ty hit the road because they think the act of leaving means they have escaped the old architecture of obligation, rent, work, marriage timing, family planning and whatever else was waiting for them back home. Then something older, hungrier and more patient finds them anyway. Escape, the film argues at its best, is still a direction. It is never a shield. You can drive away from one life and straight into another magnitude of evil you had not yet imagined, because you have a soul, and the road has an appetite.

Passenger FAQ

When does Passenger come out?

Passenger opens in theaters Friday, May 22, 2026. This is a theatrical-first release from Paramount, positioned as a Memorial Day weekend horror play with a clean hook: van-life romance, roadside death and a demon that travels better than its victims do.

How long is Passenger?

The film runs 1 hour, 34 minutes.

Who’s starring?

The film is led by Lou Llobell as Maddie and Jacob Scipio as Tyler, the couple whose road-life fantasy turns into a curse vehicle. Melissa Leo appears as Diana, with Joseph Lopez also in the cast.

Who made Passenger?

Passenger is directed by André Øvredal, the horror filmmaker behind Trollhunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and The Last Voyage of the Demeter. T.W. Burgess and Zachary Donohue wrote the script, which gives Øvredal a blunt, efficient machine: a couple, a crash, a van and a demonic presence that turns the open road into a haunted house with wheels and a composting toilet.

What kind of horror movie is it?

Passenger is supernatural road-horror with a haunted-house skeleton and a van-life nightmare grafted on top. Maddie and Tyler witness a fatal highway accident and realize they did not leave the scene alone. From there, the movie turns headlights, hazard lights, parking lots, woods and mobile living itself into a curse path. It sits somewhere between demonic possession movie, highway folklore, jump-scare machine and B-reel horror about the terrible discovery that escape is still just another direction.