This article reveals the plot and ending of The Road Ahead (Where Do We Go From Here?).
A man rings a doorbell. Leo answers. A few seconds later, he is on the ground, punched in the face, then dragged to a car and thrown into a trunk where several bodies are already lying. His kidnapper has almost nothing to say to him: “Stay.” Then, a little later: “Dig.”
That is how The Road Ahead (Where Do We Go From Here?) begins, a short film I wrote, produced, directed and starred in back in 2021. At first glance, it is a kidnapping story. A man is ripped away from his life, driven to isolated locations and forced, one grave after another, to bury the victims who came before him. But that is only the surface of the film.
What interested me was what happens when a force much greater than ourselves suddenly enters our lives, overturns our sense of normality and forces us to live with a reality we did not choose and have no ability to control. In 2021, that idea obviously carried a very particular resonance.
An imposed line
The project began with a fairly simple constraint. I wanted to enter the Mandy Mini Movie Fest. The film had to be five minutes or less and include one mandatory line: “Where do we go from here?”
I did not begin by trying to make some grand statement about the pandemic. First, I needed to find a story that could carry that question. But we were right in the middle of the COVID era, after months in which our habits, relationships, work and plans had all been disrupted. Where do we go from here? was no longer just a line required by a competition. It was a question a lot of people were genuinely asking.
So I imagined a character who would literally lose control of his own direction. Someone else would decide where he goes, when he stops, when he works, when he suffers, and even when he has to get back into the trunk. From there, the film could speak about COVID without having to portray the pandemic realistically.
The trunk, The Man and the new normal
Leo is given no explanation. He is kidnapped, knocked unconscious, tied by a rope around his neck, then forced to dig until he is exhausted. When he thinks he is finally done, he discovers that he has not been digging his own grave. His kidnapper tells him to take a corpse out of the trunk, place it in the hole and cover it with dirt. Then Leo goes back into the trunk. And the whole thing begins again.
The repetition was essential. At first, Leo resists. The more the cycle repeats, the more exhausted he becomes and the more cooperative he gets, until he almost seems to accept the machinery being imposed on him. Get out. Dig. Bury. Get back in the trunk.
It was a very concrete way of talking about our capacity to adapt — even to situations that, a few weeks or months earlier, would have seemed completely absurd. An exceptional situation can eventually develop a routine of its own.
The kidnapper does not really have a name either. In the screenplay, he is simply The Man. Manuel Mongrain plays him as a calm, relentless force. He does not need to justify himself or convince Leo of anything. He simply imposes his presence and his rules.
That mattered to me because some of the things that disrupt our lives are not antagonists in the traditional sense. They do not hate us. They do not negotiate with us. They simply arrive.
At the end, The Man abandons Leo at a crossroads and drives away. Only then do we see his licence plate: COVID19. The metaphor is deliberate. But the film is not simply saying, “The Man represents COVID.” The pandemic is primarily the force that triggers everything that happens inside Leo afterward.
The real question lies elsewhere: What does fear do to us once it settles in? And what remains when the thing that terrified us finally moves away?
The different voices inside Leo
This is where The Road Ahead gradually moves away from the thriller and becomes something more internal. Leo encounters different manifestations of himself: his Scary Ego, his Victim Ego and his Higher Self. I play all of them, but I wanted them to represent very different reactions to the same situation.
The Scary Ego is aggressive, almost demonic. He tries to provoke Leo, to keep him afraid. And yet, when he explains what he wants, his motivation is almost benevolent: “I just want to keep you alive.” He wants to keep Leo in a permanent state of fight or flight — constantly alert, constantly ready to detect the next threat.
That is precisely what makes him interesting to me. He is not “evil.” He is trying to protect Leo. But when a survival mechanism no longer knows how to switch itself off, protection can become a prison of its own.
The Victim Ego is the other side of that fear. He does not threaten Leo; he is completely overwhelmed by it. He keeps repeating: “I don’t wanna die.” Then he tells Leo they are going to die and that he has to run the first chance he gets.
Leo eventually answers with just two words: “Shut up.”
That moment matters because it does not mean Leo is suddenly no longer afraid. Instead, he is beginning to understand that feeling fear and obeying it are two different things. He can hear that voice without necessarily giving it control.
Then there is the Higher Self.
I designed him as the opposite of those two reactions. He speaks about presence, equanimity and breathing: “Be equanimous. Be aware. Be centered and balanced. Breathe in… Breathe out…”
That part of the character obviously comes from a world that is familiar to me: meditation, breathwork, presence, and observing what is happening inside yourself before automatically reacting to it.
But I definitely did not want to turn him into a perfect spiritual master. Leo’s Higher Self can be calm and centered, but he can also be impatient, ridiculous and frankly annoying. At the end, after spending the entire film trying to get Leo to hear him, he finally loses patience and shouts: “YOU NEVER LISTEN!” Then he starts clowning around with a pair of sunglasses he picks up off the ground.
And when Leo reminds him that he is supposed to be his “higher self,” his response pretty much sums up the spirit of the character: “Who said I was perfect?”
I wanted that humour. The film talks about fear, ego, consciousness and even enlightenment, but I did not want it to become so solemn that it pretended to have an answer for everything. Leo does not end the film “enlightened.” He simply begins to hear something he could not hear before.
From screenplay to screen
The screenplay naturally makes the different facets of Leo very explicit because they are literally named LEO’S SCARY EGO, LEO’S VICTIM EGO and LEO’S HIGHER-SELF. On screen, I could leave more room for ambiguity.
The audience does not necessarily have all the keys when these characters first appear. For a while, they may wonder whether they are watching a dream, a hallucination or some kind of parallel reality. Then the reveal of the COVID19 licence plate recontextualizes what they have just seen.
The review published by the Direct Monthly Online Film Festival describes that experience quite well: the film begins as a fairly brutal kidnapping story, then the different manifestations of Leo begin to appear, until the final reveal provides a key to interpreting the whole thing.
Some ideas also evolved between the page and the shoot. In the screenplay, for example, the Higher Self is associated with a Qi Gong movement. In the film, I instead chose to present him in the woods dressed as a samurai, meditating and then performing a sword kata — an image the DMOFF review specifically mentions.
The intention is the same, but the image gives it a different presence. That is one of the things I enjoy most about directing: the screenplay provides the structure and the intentions, and then the shoot forces you to give those ideas a physical existence.
Five minutes… then fifteen
The Mandy Mini Movie Fest constraint had one major consequence, however: The film absolutely had to fit within five minutes, while the story I had written was much longer.
There was simply too much material. The kidnapping, the repeated burials, the different manifestations of Leo, his conversations with his ego and his Higher Self, his internal progression… Trying to squeeze all of that into five minutes risked creating a series of interesting images that would be almost impossible to understand.
So I had to invent a solution for that first version: a narrator.
The voiceover described the situation and the stakes in a more poetic way, giving the audience information that I simply no longer had enough screen time to communicate through the scenes themselves. It acted as a kind of thread running over an extremely compressed version of the story. DMOFF actually mentions that narration very early in its review, particularly when describing the voice presenting the kidnapper as a “cruel king.”
It was a constraint I imposed on myself in order to make that five-minute version understandable at all. It worked within the context of the competition, but it was not the way I had originally written the story.
That is precisely why I returned to the film in 2023 to create a Director’s Cut of roughly fifteen minutes.
That version finally allowed me to do justice to the original story. The scenes could exist at their proper pace, the dialogue had more room to breathe, and the relationship between Leo, his egos and his Higher Self could develop without constantly having to be summarized by an outside voice.
So for me, the Director’s Cut is not simply The Road Ahead with ten extra minutes. It is much closer to the film I originally wrote.
And in the end, I like that both versions exist. The five-minute version is the result of a very specific constraint, and it shows how far you can push concision when you are forced to find a solution. The Director’s Cut gives the story its space back and allows the film to become what it was meant to be before anyone asked it to fit into five minutes.
Directing while also being in front of the camera
The Road Ahead was an independent project with another particular challenge: I was the writer, producer, director and lead actor, while also playing several manifestations of the same character.
That forces you to work in a fairly unusual way. When you are in front of the camera, you have to remain available enough as an actor to actually live the scene, while having prepared your intentions clearly enough as a director that you do not try to control everything at once.
And when several characters are different versions of yourself, you also have to build their relationship without actually having your scene partner standing in front of you during the shoot.
Fortunately, filmmaking is never truly a solitary exercise. Manuel Mongrain, who plays The Man, also helped with the camera work, as did Jean-François Beauregard, who also appears in the film as Extraterrestrial #1.
It was a small production, with all the resourcefulness that implies, but that is also something I enjoy about this kind of project. You write something, and then you have to figure out how to actually make it with the people, locations, time and resources you have.
And sometimes, the limitations are exactly what force you to come up with the most interesting ideas.
When the film no longer entirely belongs to you
Once a film is finished, something quite fascinating happens: Other people begin to see things in it through their own history and sensitivity.
The DMOFF review interpreted The Road Ahead as a film about the introspection brought on by the upheaval of COVID, but especially about what can happen afterward: reassessing your life, breaking away from certain automatic patterns and moving forward with greater awareness. The review specifically highlights the different manifestations of Leo’s psyche and the fact that, by the end, he is finally able to hear the consciousness he could not hear before.
That reading obviously corresponds with many things I deliberately put into the film, but I also like the fact that it does not belong entirely to me. A director can create the conditions for an interpretation, but I do not think they should dictate exactly what every viewer is supposed to understand.
The film then went on to have a life I had not really anticipated. It circulated through several festivals and notably received the Best Short Film Critics Award from the Direct Monthly Online Film Festival, reached the finals of the Only The Best International Film Awards, became a semifinalist at the Eurasia International Monthly Film Festival, and received honourable mentions at the Golden Sparrow International Film Festival and the International Smyrna Movie Fest, along with other selections.
It also received the Best COVID Film and Best First-Time Producer distinctions from OTB.
I am obviously happy about that. But what I remember most about the project is the path that led to the film: Starting with one mandatory line. Writing a story that was far too big for five minutes. Finding a way to compress it. Then coming back later to finally give it its proper scale again.
Where do we go from here?
The final scene probably remains the one that best sums up the film.
The Man is gone. Leo is no longer a prisoner. No one is telling him where to go. He is sitting in the middle of a crossroads, still stunned by what has just happened to him.
Then his Higher Self appears.
At first, Leo cannot hear him. After several attempts, the Higher Self finally loses patience. And suddenly Leo answers: “You don’t need to shout.”
For the first time, a dialogue is possible. They begin walking side by side down the road. The Higher Self asks him: “So… Where do we go from here?”
And the film does not answer. That was important to me.
In 2021, we all wanted to know what came “after.” After the lockdowns. After the fear. After the interruptions. After that strange period when something outside of us seemed to have taken possession of our calendars and part of our lives.
I did not have a definitive answer to offer. Neither did Leo.
But there is a difference between not knowing where you are going and being locked inside someone else’s trunk.
At the end of The Road Ahead, Leo still does not have a map, and he does not know what is waiting for him.
He is simply free to walk again.
And this time, perhaps, he is not quite as alone with himself.
