What He Calls a Road Trip
A Case Study of Expressway West (2018)
Written by Joshua Allen
Founder and Executive Director, The Atlantis Awards
“She can ask what is happening. He can keep driving.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. Their purpose is to examine the craft behind exceptional filmmaking—celebrating successful creative choices and identifying the mechanics behind why they work. This study follows the construction of the finished film. Its readings of performance, image, sound and structure are independent of filmmaker commentary.
Content notice: Full spoilers. Discussion includes family separation, parental absence and implied parental abduction.
The Right Answer
Mel knows how to spell “vacuum.” Her father does not, but he is considering calling the teacher who marked Brian wrong. She supplies the correction: two U’s and no E. He maintains that there is definitely an E somewhere, and eventually she lets it drop. The right answer has entered the conversation without changing its outcome.
Directed by Luke Lowder and written by Joseph Tarnacki and Lowder, Expressway West follows two children on an impromptu journey with their father. Sarah McDowell plays Mel, Boston Pierce her younger brother Brian, and Aaron Breakfield their father, Cole. The journey becomes troubling through the distance between his explanations and the circumstances the children encounter. Its adult story remains largely outside the conversations they are permitted to have.
The spelling exchange gives that distance an ordinary beginning. Breakfield does not laugh the mistake away. His suggestion that he should call the teacher extends his confidence beyond the car, while McDowell makes the correction quietly insistent. She needs the error corrected; he continues to assert it. For now, the consequence is simply an unfinished disagreement. Later, being unable to change his account of the situation will determine where the children go.
Camping, Not Living
Traveling-car noise opens the film and settles into the ambient sound beneath the conversation. A passing vehicle accompanies the title card. No score announces a threat or supplies an emotional explanation for the journey; the first information belongs to the family’s behavior and the space they occupy.
The children’s faces are available directly, while an early view of their father places his eyes and part of his face within the rearview mirror. Curtains, seat backs and window frames divide the vehicle into partial views. The arrangement does not make every shot a child’s literal perspective, but it gives incomplete access a practical form. They can travel together without having the same view of what is happening.
When the truck overheats and their father is temporarily absent, Mel initially protects the family’s privacy. A stranger stops to ask whether they need help. She gets Brian inside, discourages his answers and insists their father will return soon. Her caution requires no advance knowledge of wrongdoing: an unfamiliar adult has approached, and she is watching her younger brother. Nevertheless, she begins by defending an arrangement she will later challenge. She explains her father’s absence before asking him to account for his presence.
Her missing phone develops through the same uncertainty. “No phones, no tablets, no technology” can belong to a parent imposing an old-fashioned family outing. When she asks whether he is living in the truck, “Camping. Not living” gives another acceptable name to something she has noticed. The belongings remain visible, and the phone remains unavailable. His answers change the description rather than the circumstances.
The family still has room for familiar exchanges. Brian wants to hunt; Mel objects; their mother enters the conversation through things she has said about them. Cole’s interest in his son need not be fraudulent for his conduct to become alarming. The film allows affection to remain present while the explanation of the journey becomes harder to sustain.
The Message We Do Not Read
The first music arrives almost five minutes into the film, apparently belonging to the gas station. Mel looks at merchandise, notices another child’s attention and smiles uncomfortably. The child throws a small object toward her. She bends to retrieve it, but before she touches it, phones around the shop sound an alert.
The interruption changes the scale of the encounter without explaining why. A cut to a patron checking a phone establishes that information has arrived somewhere. We do not read it. Returning to Mel, the film gives us her uncertainty and her father’s sudden insistence that they leave.
The sustained shot carrying them out initially waits with her. When she moves, the camera circles around her far enough to include Cole at the counter, putting down money and urging the children onward. He is already opening the door when the cashier asks about his change. His refusal allows the movement to continue without a pause in which somebody might ask another question.
After the family exits, the camera floats down to the security monitor. Their vehicle is now an image available from elsewhere, although nobody is shown identifying it. The movement begins with Mel’s experience and finishes with a view she is not occupying. The film can leave her without granting us an explanatory adult scene; it makes the family observable without telling us who might be looking for them.
The music ends with the cut outside. Mel asks what is happening, but Cole orders her into the car. The phone restriction, the simultaneous alert and his hurried response now support a likely interpretation: he has taken the children without permission, or is refusing to return them, and the message concerns their whereabouts. The film supplies enough evidence to make that reading persuasive without displaying the alert or specifying the arrangements under which the journey began.
The earlier prohibition on technology changes with that inference. Other people have received information while Mel lacks her own device. Cole, meanwhile, can telephone someone and arrange their next stop. He retains a channel to the world beyond the truck while she must direct her questions to him.
Changing Cars
At the auto shop, Cole announces that they are changing vehicles. He carries belongings out of the truck toward the back of a white van, but the loading itself receives no coverage. Mel asks why the exchange is necessary. He continues moving rather than supplying an answer.
The overheating gives the proposed switch a legitimate practical explanation. Coming after the alert and abrupt departure, it also looks like an attempt to avoid recognition. The sequence permits both readings to occupy the same action. What would once have seemed like a solution to the breakdown has become another decision Mel needs to question.
She finally assembles the circumstances aloud. He is sleeping in the truck. He has stopped coming around. Their mother says he has quit his job and needs help. He will not let them go home. The screenplay does not leave every important fact unspoken; it gives Mel sufficient information to formulate the problem. What she cannot obtain is an answer that accounts for it.
“Your mom’s full of shit” redirects the confrontation toward the absent parent. Pierce’s wide-eyed response makes the remark land on the child still standing there. Cole turns away, leaving the questions where they were. The opening spelling exchange has acquired greater stakes: Mel can identify the discrepancy, but identifying it does not require him to change course.
Through the Glass
Day gives way to night, and the journey stops in the garage office. Brian works through television channels filled with static before reaching a broadcast whose speech remains too obscured to distinguish. The television has found something, but it cannot give us a useful account of what is being said. Nearby, Mel watches another incomplete exchange.
Her father speaks on the phone beyond a glass-paneled door. He asks the worker for a few more minutes to finish the call, receives assent and provides their location to the person on the line. The framing makes his activity visible while the muffled dialogue limits access to its contents. No agreement to leave the children is shown. Permission to continue speaking is the only permission we hear.
Breakfield gives the end of the call a small, separate performance. Cole looks in at Mel and offers a strained smile. It leaves his lips as he straightens and turns away. The gesture can carry reassurance, regret or concealment without settling among them. Mel receives a look from her father where an explanation might have been.
Near the end of the short, the first clearly nondiegetic music begins to emerge. A faint synthesized chord grows more prominent as the departure unfolds, adding a hollow, almost dreamy quality to the space. The original score is credited to Drugstore Ghost. Its subtle progression does not announce a solution to the adult problem. It makes the children’s vulnerability more available as their father withdraws.
The engine starts before Mel sees him leave. Headlights reach the room from outside the frame, and acceleration sends her toward the doorway. She arrives in time to see the brown-and-white truck pulling away. Cole has left in the original vehicle, without the children.
The abandoned exchange now accommodates another inference. If changing vehicles was intended to conceal a journey with the children, leaving them behind removes that particular reason to switch. The call may have changed his plans, or completed an arrangement we were never allowed to hear. His departure gives us the result of a decision without the scene in which its terms become clear.
The Phone on the Shelf
Immediately after Mel leaves the doorway, a new shot places her phone in the foreground on a shelf. Focus initially holds her face as she enters and notices it, then transfers to the handset. The object she has been seeking is finally given a clear position in the frame.
She picks it up, but its recovery does not produce a message that explains the wait. No illuminated screen is shown, and no call follows. She turns it in her hands and later looks down at it while sitting beside Brian. The film restores the object her father withheld without showing her use it to obtain an answer.
The phone therefore changes through its placement rather than through new contents. Earlier, its absence belonged to Cole’s explanation of the trip. Now it is available after he has removed himself from questioning. Leaving it can be understood as a practical provision for the children, but the film gives us the provision without the accompanying promise.
Mel adjusts the coat covering Brian as he sleeps. She was already responsible for watching him at the roadside; the ending does not suddenly invent that relationship. It changes the circumstances under which she must sustain it. Earlier, she could tell a stranger their father would be back soon. Now she has no equivalent assurance to offer her brother.
The Arrival
The final two-shot lasts approximately a minute, with a slow, nearly imperceptible dolly outward. It gives Mel time to handle the phone, attend to Brian and look beyond him. The film does not follow Cole or introduce the person who might be coming. Waiting becomes something the children and the audience have to occupy together.
The score accompanies that interval, then gradually fades as a motor approaches. Tires move over gravel. A vehicle stops outside, its engine switches off, and someone gets out. The film withholds an identifying reverse shot, but faint alternating red and blue light catches the edges of her hair and the upper corner of the wood paneling, identifying the arrival as a police car. At the cut to black, the room tone ends as well.
By then, a coherent adult story is available as an inference: a father has taken his children on an unauthorized journey, responded to an alert by trying to avoid recognition, and eventually abandoned that plan in favor of leaving them for someone to collect. The location given over the phone, the returned handset and the final arrival help connect those events. The film neither confirms nor denies that complete account, and the identity of the caller and arriving person remains outside our access.
That uncertainty does not prevent the children’s situation from becoming legible. The film has been precise about what reaches them: corrections that are rejected, orders without explanations, fragments of a conversation, an engine starting elsewhere. Its final minute stays with what Mel can do in the absence of a satisfactory account. She can cover her brother, hold the phone and listen. The story her father would not explain has changed their circumstances whether or not anybody tells her what to call it.
Version Note: This study concerns the restricted Vimeo screener supplied directly by Luke Lowder, running approximately 12:24 including credits. The film was produced at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Joseph Tarnacki and Katie Sanderson are credited as producers, Jared Freeman as director of photography, Noah McCormick for production design, and John Machado as editor. Machado is also credited as sound designer and re-recording mixer, with Kevin Mackler as production mixer. The end credits distinguish the original score by Drugstore Ghost from the songs “Merlot #5,” written and performed by Jean-Luc Swift, and “Dirigible,” written and performed by Echo Courts.
Exhibition Note: UNCSA programmed Expressway West among the third-year films in its September 21, 2018 Best of the School of Filmmaking screening. The film also appears in the Monadnock International Film Festival’s official archive, whose entry does not identify a screening date.