Ava in the End
2019 · 16m · USA
Directed by Ursula Ellis
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
After tripping over her dog and dying, a struggling actress wakes up in a virtual purgatory, bantering with a deadpan AI as she waits for her mind to be downloaded into a new body.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Ellis weaponizes the chatbot as a philosophical interlocutor—completely subversive of how sci-fi typically handles AI—but the execution feels a touch too polished for genuine transgression; the premise wants to disturb more than it does.
A formally elegant chamber piece that inherits from Beckett's dialogue tradition while gesturing toward contemporary sci-fi; the constraint of a single conversation becomes a rigorous compositional choice, though one wonders if the film's lightness occasionally sidesteps its own thematic weight.
Ellis's decision to play the entire afterlife as deadpan textual exchange—no visual spectacle, just the actress and the void between her words and the AI's—is the film's lifeline; that formal restraint is what makes the small, human questions about reinvention actually sting.
Reviews
Deftly balancing between funny, scary, sad, and touching.
For a short film about a woman who just died and finds out that's not even the worst of it, this is incredibly charming.
Festivals
- Fantasia International Film Festival 2019
- Etheria Film Festival 2020