Road games: "Passenger"

Having broken through internationally with 2010's fun Troll Hunter and headed west with 2016's fitfully inspired The Autopsy of Jane Doe, the Norwegian genre specialist Andre Øvredal now beds down in America with the horror equivalent of a road movie. Passenger, Øvredal's latest, presents as either The Hitcher for a generation who came along in the wake of that film's lacklustre 2007 remark, or a revival of that Jeepers Creepers/Wrong Turn/Dead End school that flourished around the millennium; approached on its own terms, however, it works surprisingly well. After a pre-title prologue establishing the many things that can go wrong while driving along remote backroads in the middle of the night - a taut short film in itself, to the extent that it provided the bulk of the movie's trailer - we arrive at the main event: the flight of a young, photogenic, upwardly mobile couple who leave their New York home in a camper van so as to undertake what's planned as a six-week road trip. The pair have reason to celebrate: on the first night, Tyler (Jacob Scipio) successfully proposes to Maddie (Lou Llobell). Yet they also have reasons to be on guard, not least the sudden proximity of the same claw-wielding antagonist who brought the prologue to such a grisly halt, and who early on here leaves three prominent scratches on the once-gleaming bodywork of Tyler and Maddie's vehicle. A quick glance at the Hobo Code - apparently as useful in 2026 as it was back in 1936 - confirms the worst: this couple have been marked for death. Hold the invites, put the wedding champagne on ice.

The cat-and-mouse game that results follows a familiar route - and, indeed, goes especially route-one in setting its supernatural passenger's lore in place. (At one point, we see Maddie logging on to a webpage that bears the none-too-snappy headline "My Sister Died In A Road Crash, We Still Don't Know What Caused It". Maybe the Passenger did for the subeditors, too.) But Passenger gets a lot of the multiplex basics right. Øvredal casts well, for starters: unknowns Scipio and Llobell foster a loving relationship we hope to see prosper, while Melissa Leo channels both the Frances McDormand of Nomadland and Maria Ouspenskaya as the veteran traveller warning these youngsters off this path ("people don't take trips; trips take people"). While forever keeping events in motion, Øvredal also knows how to use the widescreen frame to convey unease; this is very much one of those instances where a director has found ways to overcome the limitations of a makeweight script. The setpieces here, tricksy yet effective, get better as they go along: a walk across a deceptively empty carpark, the unlikely redeployment of a portable movie projector (showing studio Paramount's Roman Holiday) to discern who or what has been trampling the foliage amid one nocturnal pitstop. Best of all is a quietly unnerving suspense sequence that finds the van up on a jack, a handful of wheel nuts going AWOL and this director and DoP Federico Verardi working small wonders with a red-flashing emergency light. Set against the Weapons of this world, it's meat-and-potatoes fare, but not every film in this current horror renaissance has to come burdened with grandiose vision; sometimes you just want your popcorn kernels lightly jostled of a Saturday night. Passenger, an honest-to-goodness B picture, will absolutely do that for you.

Passenger is now showing in selected cinemas.