A grieving woman visits a facility promising an artificial afterlife where the living can reunite with the dead.

Ensouled is a haunting blend of sci-fi and horror that explores the fragile boundary between memory and reality. The film follows a grieving woman who turns to a mysterious facility offering an artificial afterlife — a place where the living can reconnect with those they’ve lost. What begins as a hopeful attempt to find closure quickly reveals something far more unsettling, as technology blurs the line between comfort and control.

With a chilling atmosphere and emotionally grounded core, Ensouled taps into one of humanity’s oldest desires: to see our loved ones again. But as the illusion deepens, so does the question of what is truly being preserved — and what might be lost in the process. It’s a thought-provoking meditation on grief, identity, and the dangerous allure of recreating the past.

Ensouled imagines a facility where the living can reunite with the dead through an artificial afterlife. What was the original idea or question that sparked this story?

If we could use technology to replace ourselves, should we? I’ve always been a bit uneasy about how rapidly AI is advancing and about our impulse to make it resemble us. That unease eventually led me to something more personal, the universal experience of grief. I started wondering what a world would look like where that was actually possible, and what the cost of that possibility might be. Ensouled grew out of that collision between the technological and the deeply human.

The film sits at the intersection of grief and technology. How did you approach balancing the emotional reality of loss with the speculative sci-fi concept?

The grief had to come first. If the audience doesn’t feel the weight of what these characters have lost, the sci fi concept is just a gimmick. So I always tried to ground every scene in real, recognisable emotion, the kind of longing that doesn’t need a specific setting to make sense. I wanted the speculative elements to feel almost inevitable, like a natural extension of how far people will go when they’re desperate.

You mention being fascinated by the relationship between technology and human psychology. How does Ensouled explore that tension between innovation and our deeper emotional needs?

The film asks whether technology that’s designed to comfort us can end up doing the opposite. The facility in Ensouled promises comfort, but what it’s really doing is exploiting the most vulnerable thing about us: the fact that we can’t let go. I think that tension is everywhere in our lives already. We build tools to connect, to feel better, to solve problems, but those tools often create new kinds of pain we didn’t anticipate.

Films like The Matrix clearly influenced your early fascination with sci-fi. Were there other cinematic or philosophical inspirations that helped shape the world of Ensouled?

Well, it might be obvious that Blade Runner (1982) inspired a lot of the themes in the film. Beyond that, I’m always drawn to films that blend the emotional space between sci fi and horror, stories that use speculative premises to explore what it means to be human. Philosophically, I kept returning to the question “Who created us?” and how our drive to create intelligence in our own image might be a reflection of that same existential curiosity. I was also thinking a lot about the ethics of consciousness and what happens when the line between the living and the artificial starts to blur.

The idea of technology recreating human consciousness raises complex ethical questions. What moral dilemmas were you most interested in confronting through the story?

I was interested in the dilemma of commodifying something sacred. The moment you build a business around death and reunion, you’ve turned grief into a transaction. Those were the tensions I wanted the audience to sit with uncomfortably.

Horror often emerges from the unknown or the uncanny. How did you approach building a sense of unease around something that is, on the surface, meant to comfort people?

That juxtaposition is the whole engine of the horror. The facility is supposed to feel safe, welcoming, even beautiful, because that’s how you’d sell something like this. But bizarrely, it doesn’t. Yet some people still find themselves drawn to the “message.” I also took a lot of inspiration from my own real life experiences with bureaucratic systems that reduce a person to a number. That, and a lot of experimenting in the edit with sound design and pacing to slowly instil that unease.

The facility itself becomes a symbolic space, somewhere between sanctuary and trap. How did production design and atmosphere help express that duality?

It kind of started early with this one. I remember coming across that location during a very early draft of the script. There’s a backstory to the entire world that was explored in a feature script, so for us, it was important to honour that. We came across this bunker that just felt perfect. No windows, brutalist, and a real time capsule. The audience might not pick it up at first, but the story is supposed to take place in the future; however, the entire environment is very retro. What was great about it as well is that we really only used what was available to us in that facility. I wanted it all to feel authentic and not forced, and luckily, I think we were able to achieve that.

The film touches on humanity’s desire to create technology in our own image. Do you see this as an expression of curiosity, control, or something more existential?

I think it’s all three, but at its root, it’s existential. We seem to be the only species that’s obsessed with knowing where it all came from. So we create things that look and think like us. I think that impulse is less about control and more about answering the question we can’t answer. If we can create consciousness, maybe that gets us closer to understanding our own.

What are the books, podcasts or even YouTube channels that you recommend young filmmakers to get their hands on?

I’m a big believer in learning beyond just filmmaking technique. But to answer the question, for craft, I’d recommend Making Movies by Sidney Lumet, The Anatomy of Genres by John Truby, and Andrey Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time. But generally speaking, I’d say the best education a filmmaker can have is life and curiosity. Human psychology, experiences, philosophy, and history can teach you so much. The technicalities are getting easier and easier, so it’s really about nurturing your mind to be able to communicate an idea or tell a story. And honestly, just watching films critically is the best education.

Can you share with us some of your favourite short films you’ve seen lately?

I’ve been guilty of not watching as many short films in the past few years, to be very frank. But I always find myself gravitating towards older films these days, the classics and the not so mainstream ones as well. Here’s a list of my all time favourites that I rewatch on a regular basis: Stalker, Dog Day Afternoon, There Will Be Blood, Blade Runner, Metropolis, Arrival, Solaris by Tarkovsky, 12 Angry Men, Ran, City of God,
2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, and Once Upon a Time in America.