Passenger review – generic jumpscare horror offers bumpy journey to nowhere

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A demonic entity attaches itself to travellers on the road in this competently directed but hopelessly indistinctive scare-free misfire As Obsession , a micro-budget horror made by a YouTuber , continues to overperform with critics and audiences, and as another twentysomething content creator prepares to break a potential record with the release of Backrooms , here comes a stodgy by-the-book Paramount horror that feels like someone’s embarrassing dad just gatecrashed a college party. While others might be trying to innovate, those involved with Paramount’s generic schedule-filler Passenger are perfectly content to keep things lazily trucking along as they always have. Even if it wasn’t stuck in an unfortunate gen Z genre sandwich, it would still be a struggle to see why anyone would want to hitch a ride with this one. Like February’s cursed misfire Psycho Killer , another junky on-the-road studio horror, Passenger plays like something that would have gone straight to unrated DVD back ...
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The Wire review – locals deal with razor-sharp border fence in migrant study

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Documentary sheds light on responses to a fence designed to keep migrants of the EU Schengen area, a dizzyingly complex issue

Endless newsreel and column inches have been devoted to Europe’s migrant crisis over the past decade, and we are no nearer to getting to grips with the problem. This documentary by Croatian director Tiha Gudac opens up a fresh perspective by focusing principally on the effects on destination or transit countries: namely a beautifully sylvan stretch of the Croat-Slovenian border demarcated by the Kupa River and, now, horrible lengths of coiled razor wire laid down by the EU to prevent migrants from breaching the Schengen area.

The border fence sullies farmland and forests, complicates river tourism and separates Croatian and Slovenian communities who have ties going back centuries. The Balkan region is one with particular sensitivity to artificial segregation, and the local people tentatively fight back: early on, we see Croats and Slovenians joining up for a cross-border fun run. For those with long memories, this grim palisade, and the inhumane rejection of non-Europeans it implies, chimes with wartime fascism. But not everyone sees it that way: one father, mother and daughter spend their family time crawling under the wire to scope out points on the frontier where interlopers might be hiding.

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