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Antonioni's The Passenger is a film about a British Press journalist named David Locke, whose most recent project is to document a rebellion taking place in Africa. The film opens with images of Locke attempting to get directions and secure a guide to the rebel encampment. After his truck breaks down in the desert, the frustrated Locke returns to his hotel and discovers a man lying dead in an adjacent room. Robertson, the dead man, is a fellow traveler from England whom Locke has met, and whom Locke resembles physically to an uncanny degree. Suddenly, Locke decides to trade in his identity for Robertson's, to exchange his journalist's clothing and equipment for his double's blue shirt and appointment book.
After a brief trip to London, Locke embarks upon the itinerary laid out in Robertson's calendar, heading for Munich. In the airport, he discovers that a key that was part of Robertson's personal effects opens a locker in which a packet of diagrams for weapons has been stored. Posing as Robertson, Locke then goes to a meeting in a nearby baroque church, where he completes a weapons deal with a rebel leader named Achebe. Back in London, Locke's wife Rachel has heard the news of her husband's alleged death. She and a friend sit at a flatbed, poring over reels of Locke's documentary footage of Africa. Rachel's friend, Knight, wants to construct a memorial for Locke by editing the footage together, but Rachel is skeptical. She instead recalls a few transient memories of her husband.
By the time we return to Locke, he has departed to fulfill more of Robertson's appointments, this time in Barcelona. No one arrives at the designated places and times, but Locke does meet a girl he recognizes whom he has glimpsed briefly in London. On the labyrinthine rooftop of a Gaudi building, Locke enlists the girl to help him in what he calls his quest “to disappear.” It is not entirely clear whether “to disappear” means to sever his ties to his previous life, to become Robertson fully,