FILM: PASSENGER
or: The Horror of Ownership
I’m 45 and I’ve never owned a home. I love road trips the way some people love their backyards — the open highway feels less like escape and more like arrival. I deeply resonate with van life as a political act, a middle finger to the American Dream’s central premise that you must own the land beneath your feet to be a legitimate person.
So I came to André Øvredal’s Passenger primed to love it. A supernatural horror film set in van life, a young couple trading the settled life for the open road? Sign me up.
I left furious. Not scared. Furious.
Passenger follows Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio) a few weeks into their van life adventure when they witness a fatal roadside accident and find themselves hunted by a demonic entity — the eponymous Passenger, a supernatural highwayman who stalks travelers. The film crafts its dread by playing with perception, using the familiar routines and sounds of driving as ominous signs of incoming disaster. For most of its runtime it’s elegant and genuinely terrifying — there’s a sequence in a forest involving a film projector that is one of the most creative, disorienting scenes I’ve seen in years. Øvredal knows how to build dread out of negative space.
But the forest scene works because the film hasn’t tipped its hand yet. It still feels like anything could happen — not because we doubt the Passenger is real, but because we don’t know why any of this is happening. The rules are murky. The lore is gestural. And that’s frightening in exactly the right way, because real dread lives in the gap between something is wrong and here is a full explanation of the wrong thing with mythology and sigils and a final boss.
Then the explanations arrive, and they are bad. The lore coalesces around the Passenger as an inverted St. Christopher — a demonic highwayman who hunts travelers — and surfaces details that collapse under the lightest pressure. There are hobo markings, the old transient warning system scratched into fence posts and doorframes. In Passenger, these marks are a warning about the Passenger himself. But who’s leaving them? The Passenger, warning people about himself? Some separate hobo ghost running a volunteer PR operation for a demon it apparently can’t stop? The film doesn’t say, and the less-stupid explanations are still pretty stupid. Every answer generates three worse questions. The film leans into its sillier aspects in the third act — which is generous phrasing. It falls into them, and its ideology falls with it.
Because Passenger has an argument to land, and landing it requires killing everything interesting about the first hour. The argument is this: the road will kill you. Settle down. Buy the house. Have the kids.
I’ve written before about how horror is far more conservative than its reputation suggests. Slasher films enforce patriarchal norms — only the girl who lives defined by the white male gaze survives. Possession films tell us that straying from religious institutions leaves us spiritually vulnerable. Even “progressive” horror is often remarkably comfortable with the status quo when you examine its actual mechanics. What’s more conservative than don’t make deals with the devil? What’s more traditional than the institution will protect you if you submit to it?
Passenger fits this pattern perfectly, and its ideology is baked into its mythology. The Passenger isn’t just a demon — he’s specifically a demon of the road, a dark inversion of St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers. Where Christopher protects those in motion, this entity hunts them. He’s feared by the crusties who embrace van life — a “highwayman from hell,” as Melissa Leo’s Diana puts it. The theological argument is right there on the surface: yes, St. Christopher protects travelers — but his power is limited, and there’s an evil St. Christopher who comes for people who refuse to settle.
Tyler even says the settled life is “overrated.” The film punishes him for this. Maddie, who never fully committed to the road — she left behind a gorgeous apartment, sunlight streaming through large windows, shiny wood floors, her resolve briefly faltering before she climbed into the van — is the one who makes it. When Tyler proposes and she accepts, she immediately suggests splurging on a hotel. Crisp sheets. Solid walls. The film treats this as tenderness. It’s actually the thesis.
Life in motion is life in danger. The only safety is property.
This is not a neutral statement. And in 2026, it’s not an innocent one.
We are watching a genocide carried out in the name of land ownership. The logic animating the ongoing destruction of Palestinian life — that certain people have a sacred, inviolable claim to a specific piece of land, and that others may be displaced, starved, and killed to enforce that claim — is the same logic that ran the Trail of Tears, that built the reserve system, that justified apartheid. The theology of property isn’t a neutral backdrop to human civilization. It’s one of the bloodiest ideas we’ve ever had.
Against that backdrop, a horror film that makes not owning property into spiritual peril lands differently than it might have otherwise.
And here’s the thing: the New Testament offers zero support for this. Jesus has no theology of land. None. He wasn’t even born in a stable — that’s a mistranslation that stuck. He was born in a relative’s home because his family was traveling, and two years later was a refugee fleeing a government that wanted him dead. In his adult ministry he was relentlessly itinerant, meeting people at wells and roadsides and open hillsides rather than inside institutions. In a culture where hospitality was central to relationship-building, Jesus’ homelessness refused to inscribe welcome at any fixed address — he went out rather than welcomed in, creating new spaces of encounter beyond the confines of any owned space.
And when his disciples asked what they’d get for leaving everything behind to follow him, Jesus didn’t promise them real estate. He said — Matthew 19:29, worth sitting with — “everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.” The Message puts it with characteristic bluntness: anyone who sacrifices home, family, fields — whatever — because of me will get it all back a hundred times over.
Jesus isn’t just unbothered by homelessness. He’s actively blessing it. The road is not a spiritual gauntlet to endure until you can get back to the safety of a deed. The road is the calling.
Passenger inverts this completely. It takes the van life movement — people opting out of the land-ownership economy, for whatever mix of reasons — and makes their choice into a supernatural death sentence. It’s not enough that American culture already treats un-propertied people as suspect, as failures, as nuisances to be ordinanced away. Now horror has to make them prey.
To be fair: Llobell is excellent, carrying the film’s emotional weight on precise, controlled reactions. The perceptual horror is inventive. And again — that forest scene. I will think about that forest scene for years.
But the third act’s implosion into Conjuring-universe CGI chaos isn’t just a craft failure. It’s the price of certainty. The film is frightening precisely as long as it withholds explanation — as long as the gap stays open between something is hunting us and here is the full demonological breakdown of why. The moment it commits to answers, the answers are embarrassing, and the argument underneath them is worse.
The right question was never how do we defeat the demon that hunts travelers? The right question is why are we so desperate to make wandering scary?
Who benefits from a culture that treats home ownership as the only safe option? Who benefits from horror films that literalize itinerancy as spiritual peril? Not the people sleeping in their cars because rent is impossible. Not the people living in vans by choice or necessity, building community outside the property economy. Not the Palestinians watching the world debate the legality of their displacement while their homes are bombed into rubble.
The Passenger is the villain in this film. But the film’s real monster — the one it wants you to accept, to internalize, to take home with you — is the mortgage.
Buy the house. Stay put. Stop moving.
I refuse.
I'd had enough friends come out of this less than impressed that I already wasn't planning on seeing it. Too bad, because the initial idea does sound intriguing.