Back in January, anyone who saw Primate in theaters walked out with two thoughts. The first was that the killer-chimp movie was much better than they expected. The second, possibly louder, was that they had just seen a 60-second teaser for André Øvredal’s Passenger that scared the audience harder than the feature did. Dread Central called it a theater-exclusive trailer “incredibly effective” with “audible screams and gasps.” TikTok lit up about it. Jeff Rauseo, a fairly typical horror TikTok account, posted a breakdown that pulled hundreds of likes. The setup, two friends on a wooded road late at night, a hitchhiker that won’t go away, a final reveal that puts the hitchhiker in the passenger seat looking directly at the driver, was a small piece of perfect horror filmmaking. Paramount didn’t put it online. You had to be in a theater for Primate to see it. Word of mouth did the rest.
That teaser is the reason Passenger was one of the most anticipated horror films of the year. Which makes what happened next strange. Paramount took a movie with a genuinely viral teaser, the kind of organic theater-only buzz studios spend millions trying to manufacture, and released it on May 22 with almost no fanfare. No major trailer push to match the teaser’s reach. No saturation marketing. The film opened over Memorial Day weekend and lost decisively to The Mandalorian and Grogu, landing soft in a holiday frame where a buzzy horror title should have overperformed. For a movie whose teaser had people screaming in theaters in January, the May release felt less like a launch than a quiet drop. And now that critics have seen it, the quiet starts to look intentional.
Let’s start with what the movie is. André Øvredal directed, working from a screenplay by Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess. The film stars Jacob Scipio and Lou Llobell as a young van-life couple who witness a horrific roadside accident and then realize that something demonic crawled out of the wreck and is now following them. Walter Hamada (formerly the executive overseeing the Conjuring and It franchises at Warner Bros) and Gary Dauberman (the It screenwriter) produced for Hamada’s 18hz, the same shingle that just made Primate with Johannes Roberts. The whole infrastructure is people who know horror.
And the reviews explain the silence. As of this writing, Passenger sits at 44% on Rotten Tomatoes, down from a higher mark in its first days as more reviews landed, which is the trajectory of a film critics turned on rather than warmed to. /Film called it jump-scare heavy nonsense and noted Øvredal couldn’t overcome “a clunky script and two highly uninteresting lead characters.” TheWrap titled their review “Hitchhiking Ghost Takes the Highway to Ho-Hum.” Inverse called it “running on empty,” “predictable and mediocre,” and compared it to “gas-station nachos.” Plugged In said the movie “feels very much like a series of online horror shorts all tied together with a gossamer narrative thread.” The FilmBook review opens by calling it “André Øvredal’s dismal new horror film.” That is, technically, a 4.5-out-of-5 sentence in terms of vibes.
There are positive reviews, and they’re worth noting for fairness. Variety called it a “stylish, satisfying thrill-ride.” RogerEbert.com praised it as “gnarly B-horror” with three strong setpieces and no real clunkers. Empire liked it. Heaven of Horror called it a “surprise treat.” The split is real. But the dominant critical reaction, and the one driving the score down, is some flavor of: this movie can’t sustain what the teaser promised.
That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? The teaser was a complete short film. It had a setup (the friends in the car), an escalation (the loop on the road, the recurring hitchhiker), and a final scare (the passenger in the seat). It worked because it was 60 seconds of pure tension with no music. The feature is 94 minutes of stretching that tension across a road movie with a couple you don’t really care about, and the consensus is that Øvredal couldn’t get the proportions right. The Wrap’s point, paraphrased: Freddy Krueger kills you in your dreams, which is primal. Jigsaw asks how much pain you’d endure to stay alive, which is primal. The Passenger is a hitchhiker that shows up in your car, which is creepy but not primal. The teaser made you think it would be both. The movie made you think it was only the first.
Øvredal’s track record makes the letdown sharper. His Trollhunter (2010) is a found-footage classic. The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) is one of the best low-budget horrors of the 2010s. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019) had its problems but worked. The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) was overshadowed by a poor theatrical run but still found defenders. Passenger is the first time the consensus reads as “he made a bad movie.” That’s not nothing for a director who’s been a fairly reliable name in genre for over a decade.
The teaser’s success also points to a broader 2026 problem. The Longlegs marketing playbook (release a chilling fragment, generate buzz on imagery, withhold story) is now industry standard for mid-budget horror. The teaser-as-art-object approach assumes the eventual movie will reward the buildup. When it doesn’t, the gap between trailer and feature becomes the entire conversation. Audiences walked into Passenger this weekend already in the mode of asking: is it as good as that promo? The answer was, by a lot of accounts, no.
So here’s where Passenger lands. It’s not a disaster. It’s a 44% movie with a 1:34 runtime and a few legitimately creepy moments, split enough that Variety and Roger Ebert’s site found things to admire. It’s also, by the weight of the consensus, a movie that promised more than it could pay off, attached to one of the best horror teasers in recent memory and released by a studio that seemed to know the feature couldn’t cash the check the teaser wrote. The quiet rollout, the soft Memorial Day opening, the lack of a marketing push to match the January buzz: it all reads, in hindsight, like a studio managing expectations downward. The teaser will outlive the film. That’s not the headline anyone wanted, least of all Paramount, but it’s the one we have.
If you saw the teaser ahead of Primate in January and have been waiting since, see the feature for completeness. If you missed the teaser and you’re trying to decide whether Passenger is worth a ticket: it isn’t, particularly. Wait for streaming. Then watch the teaser on YouTube before you watch the movie. The order matters.
