Most films about mind uploading and digital immortality focus on the mechanics: what is scanned, what is preserved, what kind of entity emerges. “One Last Round,” the short film written and directed by Kor Adana and premiered at HollyShorts Film Festival in August 2025, starts somewhere different. It starts with grief.

Adana, best known as a writer and producer on “Mr. Robot” and “Star Wars: The Acolyte,” brought a precise creative sensibility to the project. He has described the film as a personal one, rooted in his own fear of losing people he loves and his growing fascination with whether artificial intelligence could preserve human consciousness indefinitely. The question that drives the narrative is not technical but moral: “Is it moral to defy nature’s course? Would it taint the grieving process or provide solace?”

Those are not questions most AI researchers are asking. They are the questions everyone else is asking, and the gap between them is where “One Last Round” does its work.

What the Film Explores

The film follows a family confronting terminal illness and the prospect of digitally preserving a dying family member’s consciousness. The plot specifics are deliberately unspecified in Adana’s public descriptions of the project, keeping the focus on emotional and philosophical territory rather than technical exposition.

The film’s visual approach encodes its central argument directly. As digital preservation occurs, the main character undergoes a “warm to cool” color transformation: from the amber and gold tones associated with human warmth, intimacy, and biological life, to cooler, more clinical blues and whites associated with machine-like existence. The shift is not subtle. It asks whether what emerges from digitization retains the essential qualities that made the person worth preserving in the first place.

That visual grammar is a direct statement about substrate. Warmth is biological. The cold is not hostile, but it is different. The question the film poses is whether “different” is acceptable when you are the family member who has to decide.

Adana’s Frame: Personal Stakes

Adana’s motivation for making the film is worth taking seriously. He did not approach digital immortality as a science fiction premise to explore. He approached it as a real question he wanted to think through because he feared losing people he loves.

This is a different entry point than most media in this space. The major studio productions on mind uploading, from “Transcendence” to Amazon’s “Upload,” engage the concept as a speculative world-building exercise first and as a personal question second, if at all. Adana inverted that. The technology in “One Last Round” exists to pressure-test an emotional reality, not to showcase a speculative future.

The result is that the film engages with what the digital afterlife industry is actually selling: not immortality as an abstract philosophical prize, but something more concrete and more fraught. The pitch is comfort. The pitch is that you do not have to lose someone completely. The pitch is that something continues.

Whether that something is the person, or a very good approximation of the person, is exactly what the film refuses to resolve cleanly.

The Grief Problem

The specific question Adana raises, whether digital preservation taints or provides solace to the grieving process, maps onto a real debate in psychology and ethics. Grief counseling research has long debated the role of “continuing bonds”: the ways bereaved people maintain psychological relationships with the dead through memory, ritual, and narrative.

Digital AI replicas, the current commercial version of the concept offered by services like StoryFile and HereAfter AI, change the nature of continuing bonds in ways that grief researchers are still evaluating. A static photo in a frame invites projection. An AI that responds, adapts its tone to your mood, and recalls your shared history in real time is a categorically different thing. Whether the difference is therapeutic or psychologically counterproductive depends on the individual, the context, and the quality of the replica.

The families using these products now are not waiting for the philosophy to catch up. They are making the decision Adana depicts. Which means the question is already live, not hypothetical.

The Ethics of Preservation

Adana’s central moral question connects directly to the philosophical debates about posthumous consent and the ethics of digital ghosts. The ethics of designing posthumous digital personas involves questions about who authorizes the preservation, who controls the resulting entity, and whether the preserved consciousness, if it has any form of experience, has interests that should be respected.

“One Last Round” approaches this from the side of the living rather than the preserved. The family makes a decision about whether to preserve a dying member. This framing highlights the power asymmetry: the person being preserved may not be in a position to meaningfully consent, and the decision is being made by people whose motivations are entangled with grief, love, and a desire to avoid a specific kind of loss.

Whether that is a good enough basis for a decision that creates, or claims to create, a continuing version of a person is a question the film holds open rather than answers.

Short Film as a Medium for This Subject

The choice of short film format is itself interesting. Feature films about digital immortality tend toward world-building: they need to establish the technology, show how society has adapted, and play out the implications across a full narrative arc. Short films operate under different constraints. They cannot afford extensive exposition. They have to locate a single emotional truth and pursue it.

For a subject as philosophically dense as mind uploading, the short form is in some ways more honest. The big questions about consciousness, identity, and death do not resolve over two hours in a multiplex. They do not resolve at all. A film that holds them for ten or fifteen minutes and then releases the viewer to continue sitting with them may be more appropriate to the actual experience of these questions than any feature could be.

Adana’s background in television, specifically in “Mr. Robot“‘s technically precise, emotionally grounded style, is visible in the project. Mr. Robot was unusual for a technology-adjacent series in that it took the human damage of its technical premises seriously. “One Last Round” applies the same sensibility to a narrower canvas.

Connecting to Real Research

The scenario “One Last Round” depicts is not science fiction in the way that the Soulkiller from Cyberpunk 2077 or the mind upload procedure in Pantheon are science fiction. The 2026 short film Dirty Halos operates in adjacent territory, exploring the horror of non-consensual consciousness overlay and biological rejection of an uploaded mind. It is extrapolated from technology that already exists in primitive form. Current AI memorial services cannot preserve consciousness. They can simulate conversational behavior based on past data. The gap between those two things is enormous.

But the emotional scenario, family facing loss, offered the option to preserve something, debating whether to take it, is real now. And the gap between what the technology can actually deliver and what grieving families need from it is where most of the harm is likely to happen in the near term, before anyone gets close to actual consciousness transfer.

The whole brain emulation roadmap estimates decades before functional brain emulation is feasible at human scale. In that gap, the commercial grief tech market will continue to offer services that claim to preserve people and that cannot, in any meaningful sense, do so. “One Last Round” is a film that lives in that gap.

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Official Sources

• Kor Adana (Director/Writer/Producer), “One Last Round,” premiered HollyShorts Film Festival, August 2025 — League of Filmmakers profile
• Cast: Jake McDorman, Ana Cruz Kayne, Grace Jenkins
• Producers: Nick Geisler, Harris Kauffman, Bennett Cordon
• HollyShorts Film Festival: Annual international short film festival, Los Angeles — hollyshorts.com
• Kor Adana credits: “Mr. Robot” (USA Network, 2015-2019), “Star Wars: The Acolyte” (Disney+, 2024)