Written by Antonioni, Mark Peploe, and Peter Wollen, the film is about a disillusioned Anglo-American journalist, David Locke (Jack Nicholson), who assumes the identity of a dead businessman while working on a documentary in Chad, unaware that he is impersonating an arms dealer with connections to the rebels in the civil war.

The Passenger was the final film in Antonioni's three-picture deal with producer Carlo Ponti and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, after Blowup (1966) and Zabriskie Point (1970).

The film received strong reviews, with critics praising Antonioni's direction, Nicholson's performance, the cinematography, and its themes of identity, disillusionment and existentialism.

[3] In 2005, with Nicholson's consent, Sony Pictures Classics remastered the film, giving it a limited theatrical re-release on 28 October 2005, and releasing it on DVD on 25 April 2006.

After a long walk through the Sahara back to his hotel, an exhausted Locke discovers that a fellow guest (Robertson), an Englishman with whom he had struck up a casual friendship, died in his room of a heart attack that same night.

Later (at La Pedrera, another Gaudi building on Paseo de Gracia), Locke asks the girl to fetch his belongings from the hotel so that he will not be seen there by Martin, who is watching the lobby.

His contact does not show up; the men arranging the arms deal are abducted, interrogated, and beaten by hitmen operating for the Chadian government.

Having heard from Martin of his unsuccessful chase in Barcelona, Rachel is shocked as she opens Locke's passport to find Robertson's photo pasted inside.

Virtually trapped, Locke checks into a hotel in the Spanish town of Osuna, where he finds that the girl has returned and booked a double room posing as Mrs. Robertson.

[7] After Zabriskie Point (1970) was released, Antonioni spent two years on pre-production work, including location scouting near the Amazon River.

[12] Principal photography took place in the Illizi Province of Algeria (to depict Chad), London, Munich, Barcelona and locations across south-eastern Spain throughout mid-to-late 1973.

Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote the film was "a suspense melodrama, a story so basically conventional that it isn't until you're at least half‐way through it you realize it's a magnificent nightmare, and that you are on the inside looking out.

Viewers who connect to that other layer, however, will find a remarkable richness of image and idea ... Nicholson turns in another superior performance, managing to communicate his own brand of wise anger without puncturing Antonioni's grand design.

"[21] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called the film "a masterpiece of visual beauty and rigorous artistry that is as tantalizing as it is hypnotic.

[23] Hank Werba of Variety wrote Antonioni "laboriously hand-fashioned an excellent film spectacle that is so marked by his own style and anguish reflections on contemporary life as to encourage further collaborative encounters.

"[25] John Simon, in his 1983 book Something to Declare, wrote disapprovingly that "Emptiness is everywhere: in landscapes and townscapes, churches and hotel rooms, and most of all in the script.

Never was dialogue more pretentiously vacuous, plot more rudimentary yet preposterous, action more haphazard and spasmodic, characterization more tenuous and uninvolving, filmmaking more devoid of all but postures and pretensions".

The website's consensus reads: "Antonioni's classic, a tale of lonely, estranged characters on a journey though the mysterious landscapes of identity, shimmers with beauty and uncertainty.