Review of The Passenger

"The Passenger" is a German movie from 2012, so it has its 5th anniversary this year. It is the second full feature movie by Tor Iben and like his other works, this one here is also relatively short at 60 minutes only. The cast is not known at all, including lead actor Niklas Peters, who worked with Iben on several occasions. This movie is the story of three people, who end up in a love triangle and I was worried, this will be just another pretty bad and uninspired gay-themed movie that includes nothing but the relationship between the three. Oh well, I was wrong, kind of, because the longer the film goes, the more it becomes obvious that it is really much more about one of them being a psychopath killer and the question you could ask yourself is who is gonna live and who is gonna die from these three central characters. But this is the only interesting aspect as I already wrote in the title of this review. The crime aspect hasn't been handled too badly, but other than that, this film is a disappointment. The two male characters have zero chemistry. The actor who plays the killer has zero range and the other has zero material to work with. Lynn Femme is certainly pretty stunning, but in terms of acting talent I am also far from convinced and the supporting characters, even if they maybe only have one scene, are just as bad. Line delivery is a huge problem in this movie and there were so many occasions when it was wooden beyond belief that you never had the impression you were watching actual characters. What I liked, however, is that they managed to include violent scenes that fit the story nicely without making it come off as too much gore and I never got a feeling either that the violence was just included for the sake of it. It fit with the story. But this does not mean the story was good. There are as many bad moments, for example how the killer gets rid of his bodies in broad daylight without caring if anybody sees him at all. So yeah, the negative is definitely more frequent here than the positive and I personally am glad this film was over relatively quickly, even if it did not turn out as much of a failure as I initially suspected. Thumsb-down and I don't recommend the watch.