by Hudson Moura
Enya Baroux’s We Will Go (also circulating in French as On Ira/Bon voyage, Marie) is a small, disarming film that uses the soft grammar of the road movie to approach a hard subject: an octogenarian, Marie (played by the magnificent Hélène Vincent), in advanced, painful cancer, decides she will not let her final journey be organized for her. She will choose how to go, with whom, and under what rules. What could have been yet another French family melodrama about decline becomes, through Baroux’s script, a film about agency at the very end of agency.
The key to the film is the letter Marie writes for Rudy (played by the charismatic clumsly beau gosse Pierre Lottin), the care worker who comes when she is literally stuck halfway up the stairs on her chair-lift. “It was out of the question,” she writes, “that someone impose a route on me. Thanks to him, my requests were respected.” That letter is more than a thank-you; it is the film’s thesis. Marie wants to travel “in good conditions,” which here means: not hidden, not infantilized, not morally disciplined into docility. She will go to Switzerland to end the pain, but she will do so on terms she co-authors. And Baroux has the intelligence to let Marie admit the messiness of that process: “To get around some obstacles, there were arguments, lies, clumsiness… but in the end, isn’t it by cheating often enough that we end up changing the rules?” That line alone gives the film a political shimmer.
Around this choice Baroux gathers a fragile constellation: Rudy, the caregiver who is more companion than nurse; a son drowning in debt; a granddaughter at the cusp of adolescence; and Marie herself, whose body is almost out of negotiation but whose will is not. The trip becomes a shared necessity for very different reasons: for Marie, release from pain; for Rudy, a test of professional care versus human attachment; for the family, a confrontation with the financial, emotional, and logistical costs of keeping someone alive when they are asking to leave. The film is honest about that asymmetry: not everyone is ready for Marie’s clarity.
Stylistically, Baroux keeps things modest—no flamboyant direction, no tragic over-scoring. The tone is almost deceptively light for such a grave subject, which is precisely what allows the film to stay watchable. She leans on performances, not plot mechanics. The scenes in the house, before departure, are particularly strong: an elderly woman literally immobilized by her own domestic technology, forced to call for help, then deciding that this indignity will be the last one. That opening makes the trip to Switzerland feel earned, not ideological.
If the film has a limit, it is the one of many “end-of-life” road movies: because everyone is there for a different private pain, some arcs (the over-indebted son, the girl entering adolescence) feel sketched rather than developed. And the film clearly sides with Marie’s autonomy; it does not really stage the counter-argument from within the family. But Baroux compensates with a lucid ethical through-line: the film is not about whether assisted death is right, but about who gets to script the last journey. On that question, We Will Go is warm, firm, and quietly moving and inspiring. 
(4/5)
The film will be screened at Cinéfranco: Francophone International Film Festival 