A new procedure promises to end April Neal’s grief – by replacing her with a digital copy.
In a near-future where grief can be outsourced, a bereaved artist considers a new outpatient procedure: an AI implant that can copy her mind, replace her with a digital copy, and spare her loved ones the pain of loss. But one unsettling discovery forces her to ask what, if anything, makes us truly irreplaceable. Set one product launch from today, Afterlife is a quiet sci-fi thriller about art, identity, and the slow erasure of the self in the age of artificial intelligence.
Suffering is the price of being human. This film is about embracing that.
Before my wife got pregnant, we used to debate the ethics of having children. Life does come preloaded with tragedy. Our first experience, outside the womb, is pain. Cold air burns fresh lungs. Masked aliens pull us into new worlds. And then, as we grow, the real lessons are written in blood. We crash our bikes, we get dumped, we lose loved ones, we die. And somehow, we keep going.
Most of us spend our lives trying to give meaning to our own mortality – we invest in careers, families, communities. Even our technology is hyper-focused on outsourcing the messy, painful parts of being human. We want to be happy, work less, enjoy the good things in life. So we create tools and institutions that keep us safe, entertain us, and work for us. But what’s the endpoint?
Afterlife imagines one near-future possibility: an AI implant promises a cure for depression. It copies a person’s mind, lets their original self “transcend,” and leaves behind a digital twin to finish out their lives. The body stays, the grief goes, and of course it’s covered by insurance.
I wrote this script while my wife was carrying our son – a time when the hopeful anticipation of fatherhood was met with the fear of unspeakable loss. That tension became the film: If new technology does, one day, offer such a devil’s wager, what could drive us to take it?
The real horror isn’t some rogue algorithm. It’s how quickly we might choose numbness over experience. How willingly we might surrender autonomy for the promise of relief. How close we already are to making choices we can’t claw back.
So why’d we have a kid? Ultimately, we agreed that the good outweighs the bad. Life itself is art. Creation is a defiant act of hope. The stakes don’t make us flawed, they make us what we are. So we chose to create. We chose to believe that suffering is a fair price for the human experience.
We live in a time when machines can simulate almost anything: connection, joy, grief, even art. But simulation isn’t experience. Creation still costs something. And that cost – emotional, physical, human – is what gives life (and art) its meaning.
Scott Bell is a Tallahassee-based filmmaker whose work explores the collision between speculative science fiction and deeply personal human stories. In 2016, he founded Cat Family Records, a nonprofit label and art collective that published zines, organized festivals, and supported emerging artists across North Florida. Now through Art Kid Media, he brings that same punk-rooted, DIY ethos to filmmaking: self-reliant, collaborative, and grounded in the belief that risk is essential to art. While Afterlife marks his directorial debut, he’s currently developing an ensemble feature set in present-day Tallahassee.
Email: scott@artkid.media
Production: artkid.media