I’ve always found the term “self-help” funny. If I knew how to fix whatever was wrong, I probably would have done it already. If I read a book, watch a video or listen to somebody explain how to get my life together, then somebody else is helping me. Calling that “self-help” feels like taking credit for a group project.
Still, I understand the appeal. When you feel stuck, the promise that a few simple steps could turn everything around is hard to ignore. Having somebody tell you exactly what to do can sound pretty comforting when your own ideas haven’t gotten you anywhere. Of course, it helps to know who’s giving the advice and what they stand to gain from it.
That promise takes a sinister turn in The Higher Path, a 30-minute horror short I caught at the 2026 Nashville Film Festival.
The Higher Path follows Simon (Nigel Allen), a disillusioned office worker stuck in a cycle of missed promotions, workplace bullying and unrequited feelings for his colleague, Jen (Genevieve Chenneour). When he discovers a mysterious self-help tape, its narrator (Nicholas Rowe) offers him a way to turn his life around.
Simon begins following the instructions, but as the promise of a better life draws him deeper into the Higher Path, something far more sinister begins to emerge.
What makes that setup work for me is how ordinary Simon’s frustrations are. He wants to get somewhere at work, stop being pushed around and have a chance with someone he likes. Those are understandable reasons to want a change, which makes the offer on those tapes tempting. From the outside, accepting life advice from a mysterious recording sounds like an obviously bad idea.
When you’re the person who feels like nothing ever goes your way, though, I can see how you might start listening before asking enough questions.
For a 30-minute runtime, The Higher Path packs in a lot of horror and suspense. Writer-director Duncan Roe handles the buildup to its reveals well, giving the tension time to grow before letting us see what’s been lurking beneath the surface.
A short film has limited time to establish its characters, draw us into a mystery and deliver something frightening. Here, the buildup is enough to make those reveals matter. I was curious about where Simon was headed, which gave me a reason to worry about what he might discover.
The momentary flashes of gore are especially effective. They show just enough to understand what happens without giving too much away, leaving your imagination with plenty to work with. There’s something unsettling about seeing enough to recognize something horrible and then having that image taken away before you can fully process it. The film gets a lot out of those brief glimpses.
It doesn’t need to linger on every detail for the horror to register.
Throughout the film, I kept coming back to one question: Who is the narrator? At times, the tapes seem to know far too much about Simon’s specific circumstances for this to be generic self-help advice. Broad encouragement is one thing. A recording that seems unusually familiar with your personal problems is something else entirely. That familiarity made the tapes more disturbing to me, because it raised questions about how the voice knew what it knew and why it was interested in Simon.
When Simon starts questioning what he’s hearing, a new mystery emerges. I started wondering whether he was taking life advice from a demon or maybe Lucifer, himself. That was my mind trying to make sense of the clues, and I enjoyed having a reason to consider those possibilities. Every apparent insight from the tapes made me more suspicious of the source.
There’s a big difference between someone knowing how to help you and someone knowing exactly how to get you to do what they want.
What didn’t work as well for me was the ending. While the story does reach a conclusion, it leaves too much vague for that conclusion to feel satisfying. After getting caught up in the mystery, I wanted to know for sure what had happened and what was behind it all. Instead, the film keeps those main answers locked away. The uncertainty helped build the suspense, but by the end, I wanted more of a payoff.
I don’t need every detail explained or a final speech walking me through everything I just watched. But the questions surrounding the tapes were a big part of what kept me invested, so leaving them unresolved affected how I felt about the whole experience. I wanted something firmer to take away from the ending after spending so much of the film wondering what was really going on.
The mystery had done its job getting me interested. I just wish the conclusion had rewarded that interest a little more. I give The Higher Path three out of five stars.
It makes good use of its short runtime, building suspense around a self-help program that seems to know its listener a little too well. The brief flashes of gore and the mystery surrounding the tapes kept me engaged, but the vague ending left me wanting answers more than wanting to revisit it.
I might have followed the Higher Path a little further if it had given me a clearer idea of where I’d end up.