Passenger (2026)

Can we stop this? Can we stop with the cliches and tropes around demons? Spoiler warning (feel free to skip to the next paragraph), but I’m sick and tired of movies where a demon with no actual motive other than “he’s a demon” does a bunch of spooky stuff that doesn’t make any sense and then eventually the main heroes find the secret MacGuffin and barely win and everything’s back to normal. Sorry to “ruin” the ending, but if you’ve seen any demon possession movie ever, you know how this one ends already.

I miss slasher villains. Characters like Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, Chucky, and especially Jason Voorhees.  They weren’t exactly Shakespearean, and certainly those movies had problematic portrayals of women, but their antagonists at least had unique personalities and backstories.  People remember those characters way more than today’s throw-away demons.  What I really miss is classic movie monsters, from Frankenstein to Wolf Man to Godzilla to King Kong to even Tarantula.  Those characters, usually without speaking, had complex characterizations that asked us to question societal dynamics and conduct introspection.  You get nothing of the sort in Passenger. 

It’s not all bad here. Easily the best part of the movie is its dedication to representation. Both of our main protagonists, and the only human characters who play a major role, are ethnically diverse. Jacob Scipio, of Guyanese descent, plays Ty, and Zimbabwean actress Lou Llobell plays Maddie. Their roles are pretty equal, but Llobell seems to exist more in the foreground, making this technically a female-lead film. The minor roles in the movie aren’t super diverse but you will occasionally see diversity throughout the film in other ways.

It goes pretty downhill from there.  While admittedly director Andre Ovredal does sneak in some pretty creepy subtleties hidden in the background, and plays with a couple clever ideas (most notably involving a film projector), he also makes some baffling creative decisions.  At least one sequence was noticeably shot handheld when it absolutely did not need to be so.  Far too many dialogue sequences are edited frantically; every single line of dialogue seems to invite a cut to a different angle.  If one is going to do that, I would recommend either lengthening the lines or reducing the cuts.  The formula in place here just disorients the viewer, including in scenes not meant to be energetic.