A Therapy Session Held at Gunpoint
The Passenger is what happens when someone watches a prestige character study, a mid-range Blumhouse thriller, and a YouTube video essay about “trauma arcs” and decides to mix them together in a drive-thru blender. On paper, it’s a tense psychological two-hander: a meek fast-food worker forced into a bloody road trip with an unstable coworker who wants to “fix” him. In execution, it’s less a thriller and more a very loud TED Talk about emotional growth, punctuated by the occasional shotgun blast.
Fast Food, Fast Carnage, Slow Movie
The opening massacre at the burger joint should be horrifying, shocking, and bracing—a violent jolt that sets the stakes for everything to come. Instead, it plays like a speed-run of every workplace-shooting scene you’ve already seen done better. We barely know anyone before they’re reduced to meat in the freezer, and not in a way that feels nihilistic or bold, just lazy. The film wants to use this tragedy as a springboard for deep character exploration, but mostly it feels like an excuse to shove our two leads into a car as quickly as possible.
Randy: Doormat-in-Progress
Johnny Berchtold’s Randy is framed as a timid, damaged soul who’s forgotten how to exist without apologizing first. That’s fine in theory, but the script pushes his passivity so hard he stops feeling like a person and starts feeling like a clinical case study. Randy doesn’t just avoid conflict; he practically evaporates in the presence of oxygen. The film spends a lot of time explaining why he’s like this, but “my emotions hurt people once” is repeated so frequently it starts to feel like a therapy intake form they accidentally filmed.
Benson: Murderous Life Coach
Kyle Gallner’s Benson is meant to be the dark, chaotic counterpart: a violent, unhinged force determined to drag Randy into “living his truth” by way of a multistate felony spree. He’s like if your most annoying self-help podcast host showed up with a shotgun and a hostage instead of a sponsorship deal. The problem is that the movie clearly thinks Benson is fascinating—broken but compelling, dangerous yet profound. In reality, he’s a collection of edgy monologues stitched around bursts of violence, a Tumblr quote machine with a kill count.
Trauma by PowerPoint
The film’s idea of characterization is to stop every twenty minutes and upload a fresh tragic backstory. We get Randy’s traumatic childhood incident with Mrs. Beard, explained in painstaking detail like someone reading aloud from his permanent record. Then we get Benson’s own sad-boy confessions about apathy and listlessness, framed as if the audience hasn’t seen this exact archetype wandering around genre films since the 90s. These reveal scenes aren’t woven into the narrative as much as stapled on. They scream, “THIS IS THEMATICALLY IMPORTANT,” but play like homework.
The Road Trip to Nowhere
The structure quickly becomes repetitive: Benson drags Randy to a new location tied to his past, terrorizes someone there, forces Randy into a moral crisis, then they get back in the car and repeat. Ex-girlfriend at the mall? Check. Old teacher who lost an eye? Check. Overbearing mother, both literal and surrogate? Check and check. It’s like an exposure therapy program written by someone who skimmed a self-help book about boundaries and thought, “What if we just added homicide?” The tension drains away because you can predict the rhythm of every scene long before it arrives.
Mrs. Beard: The Eye of the Storm
Liza Weil’s Mrs. Beard is one of the film’s few bright spots, not that the script knows what to do with her. Her scenes offer a glimpse of what The Passenger could’ve been: a genuinely thorny look at guilt, forgiveness, and the bizarre ways lives can fracture and still land somewhere decent. But instead of letting this meeting simmer, the film immediately pivots back to Benson’s theatrics, turning her into yet another prop in his traveling trauma circus. The genuine pathos in her story gets swallowed by the need to keep Benson “interesting.”
Violence with Training Wheels
For a movie about spree killing, hostage-taking, and torture-level emotional manipulation, The Passenger is strangely timid. The violence is brutal, sure, but it’s strangely sanitized in its impact. People die, but rarely feel like they ever lived, which undercuts both the horror and the drama. The diner waitress, for example, exists largely to be insulted, reappear later for karmic yelling, then get shot. The film seems to think this is bold social commentary—“see, everyone’s stuck and miserable!”—but it mostly reads like a script trying to pad its runtime with NPCs.
Suicide by Cop, Therapy by Epilogue
By the time Benson logs out of life via suicide by cop, the film wants us to feel some complicated swirl of sympathy and horror. Instead, you’re more likely to feel relief that the monologues have finally stopped. His last reflections on apathy and wasted life feel like a first-draft college short-film voiceover that accidentally wandered into the final cut. Meanwhile, Randy gets the sort of neat, affirming resolution that feels manufactured: he plays with Mrs. Beard’s daughter, sets a firm boundary with his mother, and voilà—years of deep psychological damage apparently processed in a single catastrophic day. Somebody call the American Psychiatric Association; they’ve been overthinking treatment.
A Slow-Burn Thriller That Forgets the “Thriller” Part
The biggest issue is that The Passenger keeps insisting it’s a thriller while behaving like a self-serious drama that happens to own a shotgun prop. Suspense is minimal because the movie is so in love with its own “broken men talking about feelings” setup that tension becomes secondary. Dark humor could’ve given the film bite, but it’s mostly unintentional: Benson’s twisted motivational-speaker energy and Randy’s extreme passivity often tip into parody. The film doesn’t seem to realize how funny it is to watch a spree killer lecture someone about “living authentically” while bodies accumulate like Yelp complaints.
Final Destination: Mild Catharsis, Major Eye-Roll
In the end, The Passenger feels like being trapped in a car with two guys: one who won’t stop apologizing, and one who won’t stop explaining why your life is wrong. There’s talent in the performances, flashes of something more complex in the premise, and the occasional genuinely unsettling moment. But the film is so eager to be profound it forgets to be compelling. It mistakes dumping backstory for depth and confuses violence plus philosophy for meaning. As a thriller, it rarely thrills. As a character study, it’s aggressively on-the-nose. As a road movie, it mostly proves that sometimes the healthiest choice really is refusing the ride.
