THE LOW ROAD

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FORMAT & GENRE: Feature Film & Vertical Short Form Series | Scottish Folk Horror

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COMPS

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE meets ALL OF US STRANGERS on the haunted roads of Scotland.

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LOGLINE

After dying in a wedding fire in northern England, two estranged childhood sweethearts are reunited aboard a mysterious taxi carrying the dead across Scotland, where they must confront the trauma and survivor’s guilt that haunted their lives long before death.

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WHY NOW

As conversations around grief, sectarian division, and emotional isolation continue across Scotland and the UK, The Low Road uses supernatural folklore and the haunting meaning behind “Loch Lomond” to explore how unresolved trauma can shape entire lives.

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MAIN CHARACTERS

RICHARD (50s): A withdrawn Glaswegian carrying decades of survivor’s guilt after surviving the 1985 bombing that killed both his and Emily’s families.

EMILY (50s): Richard’s childhood best friend and first love whose warmth masks years of buried grief.

THE DRIVER: An ancient supernatural ferryman guiding lost Scottish souls along “the low road” home after death.

 

SYNOPSIS

In 1985, young Richard and Emily survive a sectarian bombing at a Glasgow Orange Hall during Live Aid that kills both their families and emotionally scars them for life. Traumatised and separated afterwards, they make a desperate childhood pact: if one of them dies, the other will never stay behind.

Forty years later, they unexpectedly reconnect at a wedding just south of the Scottish border. Older, lonely, and shaped by unresolved grief, they rediscover the connection they lost as children. As guests drunkenly sing “Loch Lomond,” they dance together for the first time in decades and finally share the kiss they never allowed themselves to have.

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Moments later, a catastrophic fire tears through the venue.

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In the aftermath, Emily appears to take a taxi north while Richard boards a late-night train home. But strange things begin happening during the journey: frozen clocks, silent stations, distorted announcements, and passengers who never acknowledge him. At a deserted platform in Dumfries, Richard discovers the horrifying truth: both he and Emily died in the fire.

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Reunited aboard an ancient black taxi driven by a mysterious ferryman known only as The Driver, they travel through a haunted Scotland where the dead revisit the emotional roads of their lives before they can move on. As they journey through ghostly pubs, Loch Lomond, Glasgow Necropolis, and finally the Orange Hall itself, Richard and Emily confront a devastating truth: their lives did not end with the bombing. They simply stopped living after it.

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The journey reveals Richard’s buried guilt. As a child, he witnessed suspicious men moments before the bombing but was too frightened to warn anyone. For forty years he secretly blamed himself, trapping himself inside grief and emotional isolation.

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At dawn beside Loch Lomond, Emily finally lets go of her pain and disappears peacefully into the mist. Richard remains aboard the taxi, still struggling to forgive the frightened child he once was.

As the taxi disappears into the Highland fog, The Driver quietly resets the meter.

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“Still waiting on the dead?”

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The Low Road is a haunting Scottish folk horror about survivor’s guilt, inherited trauma, sectarian scars, and the terrifying possibility that some ghosts are created long before death.