SHUTTLE DIPLOMACY: ‘THE PASSENGER’ is tense and timely…
Hassan is an airport shuttle driver of Somali descent, desperately trying to support his family in a world that doesn’t make it easy. He owes money and is facing hard decisions about the future. On his regular pick-up point at Minneapolis airport, weather-related delays to flights mean a lot of waiting around, so when a young man, Lloyd, approaches and pleads with him to bend the rules and take him further afield it’s tempting. Lloyd explains he has a sick mother in a hospice and waiting around for connecting flights mean he might miss the last chance to say goodbye in person.
They’re on the road before Lloyd reveals that he wants Hassan to take him all the way to Chicago to see his ailing relative, a journey that’s six hours in each direction but for which Lloyd will pay him well. It’s too late to turn back and so Hassan, reluctantly, agrees.
But as Hassan and Lloyd hit the interstate in the driving rain, the shuttle area they left is devastated by an explosion that is quickly believed to be a terrorist attack… and now everyone is on the look-out and suspicious of strangers…
There’s a very good chance that if you intended to see a film with the word Passenger in the title, it probably wasn’t going be this one. Unfortunately, there’s a watercooler horror movie of the same name debuting this month (without the THE prefix) that’s getting a huge amount of attention and it’s only a handful of years since a Blumhouse release (that does have the exact same title) hit screens. (Two very different films, The Runner and Runner will have a similar problem in a few months’ time).
I fully admit that I was thinking about the horror release when I stumbled on to this non-supernatural tale with such a similar title, released onto streaming platforms in late June. And that confusion is a shame because this The Passenger is well worth your time.
Based on the Samuel Goldwyn Screenwriting Award-winning 2016 play Damascus by Bennett Fisher – who also writes this screenplay – and directed for the screen by Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog), the film is, for the most part, a two-hander between Djimon Hounsou and Kodi Smit-McPhee aboard a shuttle bus in the wake of an atrocity at MSP, Minneapolis’s main airport.
Hounsou’s breakthrough role was in Spielberg’s Amistad and he’s followed it with films as diverse as The Tempest, Guardians of the Galaxy, Gladiator II). He’s a very under-rated actor more than capable of the quiet intensity his role as Hassan requires. Smit-McPhee made his first impressions on screen as a child and his back-catalogue is also diverse with entries such as The Road, Let Me in and X-Men: Apocalypse – as Kurt Wagner. The same is true for the younger actor who gives Lloyd an edgy desperation built on regrets and a desire to feel validated.
The film is unashamedly about the problems built around weaponised preconceptions. We quickly realise that Lloyd is connected to the airport bombing, but to the few supporting characters we see (and the authorities), there’s certainly enough circumstantial evidence to make people look first at Hassan – some based on sheer prejudice, some on more understandable and unfortunate coincidences. One brief detour shows the reaction to news of the bombing as seen by customers at a gas station. Perhaps even more topical and disappointing than it was two years ago when the film was made, it’s telling that there’s at least one of the customers who immediately slides into a xenophobic rant about immigrants and innate criminality – aimed at the bewildered Hassan. It underlines the central notion of the film about perception and makes clear that to an outsider’s view – one who isn’t aware of the story to the same degree as the audience – it’s Hounsou’s Hassan that will seem like the more likely culprit.
Filmed in 2024 and originally sold to various international territories under The Zealot moniker, its origins as a stage-play are sometimes clearer, with the strongest scenes that rely on just the minimal frame of the two men, tapped together and each caught between personal battles and a shifting power-play. There are, as there must be for such a drama, a couple of contrivances to keep the story going (For instance, Hassan drops his phone when trying to surreptitiously make a call – though, ironically, that could have played into the epilogue with some connective-tissue) but, for the most part, the intense claustrophobic atmosphere works well.
Unfortunately, without giving specific spoilers, the film arguably stumbles at the very last hurdle – like so many movies it can’t quite deliver on an ending, or to be more accurate, the coda/epilogue that feels almost like a rewrite to give better closure. Its simplicity doesn’t spoil the preceding film, which is still worth watching and discussing on many levels, but – honestly – it isn’t hard to see how that ending could have been tweaked in any number of different ways to work more consistently with the tone of the story leading up to it.
However, the film as a whole is well worth the hour and half of its streamlined running-time and one hopes it will get seen by more than its overshadowed release might suggest.
8/10
The Passenger is available to rent on several streaming services such as Plex, Prime Video, Fandango and Apple TV.