Main cast: Niklas Peters (Nick), Lynn Femme (Lilli), Urs Stämpfli (Philipp), Maxim Albert (Marco), Annina Nusko (Lisa), and Bastian Scheibe (Max)
Director: Tor Iben
The Passenger is marketed and distributed by TLA Releasing, but the gay scenes are ones that culminate in the death of one bloke, so I don’t know whether I’d classify this one as a “gay thriller” like the publicity material would say. “Sensual” and “provocative”? Oh, don’t make me laugh. No, wait, I wish I’d laughed; the movie turns out to be very boring instead.
Nick likes to kill people. He attributes this to some… constellation, as apparently when one star is on the rise, so does his lust, blah blah blah. That’s what the subtitles say anyway, as I don’t understand German, so don’t look at me like that. He apparently likes to cover himself with his victim’s blood and then bathe naked in a river. Oh, I miss the days when serial killers will eat brains and such – this guy is so boring. He rents a room with the couple Lilli and Philipp, and soon ends up sleeping with Lilli while doing this bromance seduction thing with Philipp. To fill time, Nick will go around picking up guys and making them get naked before killing them.
I don’t know what Tor Iben, who also wrote the script, is trying to do here, because “bad guy runs circles around everyone” isn’t exactly a new thing, and he’d need something more than this premise to make the movie work. Alas, Niklas Peters spends the entire movie looking and sounding like a drugged-up Eeyore, and I can’t even make myself think of him as sexy because I just want to fall asleep whenever I see his singular dopey expression. Meanwhile the rest of the cast puts on a generally sleep and lifeless performance. After a while, I wonder whether Mr Iben somehow has blackmail material that forced these people to act in the movie.
The Passenger could do with a more charismatic protagonist who has a better motive than “I like to kill people when Mars move into Jupiter, and then I swim naked in a river!” Or, at the very least, just throw in plenty of explicit nudity and sex, like most European movies tend to do to hide the fact that they have no story line. So people, admire the chest on the DVD cover, and just move on, as there isn’t really much to enjoy or remember here.
