Van Afterlife

Passenger director Andrè Øverdal has some impressive credits under his belt, including his Norwegian language breakout hit Trollhunter and chilling haunted corpse movie The Autopsy of Jane Doe. That explains why this mediocre horror has a couple of well crafted set-piece scares, but he is saddled with a bland script that is content to tick familiar genre boxes.

Things start promisingly with the titular "Passenger" (a highway stalking demonic entity) dispatching a pair of nighttime travellers. We are then introduced to young couple Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio) who are about to abandon the city for a life on the road in their swanky van. Tyler is all in (to an obnoxious degree) but Maddie is hiding some reservations and things get spooky when they are marked by the walking metaphor for the dangers of travel.

The first issue the movie runs into is the confusing nature of the entity itself. Why does it mess around with our leads for days when it kills everyone else in minutes? Why is it struggling to choke someone with a seatbelt when it can throw people around like paper aeroplanes? Why does it try to physically force its way into the van when it can just materialise inside? Plenty of supernatural films don't care about internal logic; the trick is to keep the audience busy enough that they don't notice and that's where Passenger struggles.

There are a couple of successful jump scares and one very well crafted scene involving a film projector in the forest, but everything entertaining is played out long before the forced feeling finale. It doesn't help that the demon design is pretty boring once you get a good look at it. There is an attempt to build out the world with several bouts of exposition about the nature of the supernatural stalker and the need to understand a hidden "hobo code" (which boils down to noticing arrows pointing in a direction) in order to survive, but realistically two lines of dialogue could have covered it all. The underlying message is also a bit mean spirited, the trick to surviving a life on the road isn't community, it's never stopping to help anyone.

The leads are both game and have passable chemistry, but they aren't given much to work with in terms of character. Maddie wants a settled home because she bounced around foster families as a child, while Tyler likes the freedom of van life because he had a picture perfect family growing up but things weren't great behind closed doors. Somehow this conflict never came up in discussions before they hit the road. It's a testament to the actors that through the flimsy narrative and baby's first horror dialogue ("people don't take trips, trips take people!") you want them to get their happy ending.

Passenger gets enough of the basics right to be a passable mainstream horror, but in a genre that is filling up with new voices and ideas, it will quickly be forgotten. Sometimes travelling the well worn road isn't the right call.

5 scratched vehicles out of 10.

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