Some facets of a trip to see an AI-generated movie mimic seeing a regular one. You’re seated in a theater, one thankfully with reclining chairs. Living, breathing human beings take up the seats surrounding you. A bowl of popcorn, ostensibly popped by humans, sits in front of you.
But everything you see and hear on the screen, from the characters traversing a city on skateboards to the pizza they eat between battle scenes to many of the songs scoring the film, is generated by AI. It is, in a word, surreal.
Such surrealism is what I endured last week when I took the A train down to Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood for a private screening of “Hell Grind,” the 95-minute action adventure film produced by San Francisco AI startup Higgsfield AI. The film — which premiered last month at the Marché du Film, the Cannes Film Festival’s marketplace for films, as the main festival has banned wholesale AI-generated films — is focused on a team of four orphaned bandits led by Roco who attempt a heist before they inadvertently gain superpowers, battle an evil Japanese-speaking demon that captures one of their members, Lulu, to an underworld, launch a quest to find certain “artifacts” to open a portal to said underworld and battle the demon once again to try rescue their friend. No pressure!
The film — which was made for $500,000, mostly in compute costs, in two weeks, using a mix of ByteDance’s Seedance video generation model and Higgsfield’s own tools — screened for a mix of journalists, investors and Higgsfield personnel last week amid a flurry of competing Tech Week and Tribeca Festival events, many of which focused on AI. Executives at both festivities have tried to lure the creative community into the AI space, whether through the Wednesday premiere of an AI-generated film like Ash Koosha’s “Dreams of Violets” or parties co-sponsored by AI firms like Higgsfield or the AI music platform Suno, but creatives have slammed such products.
The plot of “Hell Grind” is nonsensical, but Higgsfield’s goal in this instance wasn’t exactly to produce a Hollywood-quality film. Instead, it’s meant to showcase the power of Higgsfield’s technology, CEO Alex Mashrabov told me, not necessarily one of quality, and in that regard, the film merits recognition. And it’s one Mashrabov wants to expand to other genres beyond action flicks.
“We have to lean into the areas where the technology is the strongest and see where it fits creator needs,” Mashrabov told me after the screening. “In terms of comedy, drama and other genres, we’re gonna get there probably in the next six, nine months.”
Within this genre, however, the film was technically impressive. Between bites of popcorn, I found myself shocked at just how real and consistent the characters looked, with children in particular scarily lifelike. Watching them move with remarkable fluidity captivated me much more than the struggles between humans of unspecified origins and demons, especially when neither camp could effectively emote. Some jokes made me laugh, and I could recognize the emotions the characters attempted to convey. I tried to Shazam some of the songs used in the film to figure out if any artists lent their tracks to this test run, but save for one, none emerged; all but one song used in the film was generated by AI, a Higgsfield spokesperson told me.
But even with such fluidity, AI’s limits still showed their face. The demon was largely limited to one expression — smugness — and was inexplicably the only character who spoke Japanese. One set of the headsets the group wore aboard a helicopter somehow had two microphones. Two characters who were stressed about keeping a secret had vocal inflections that could only be described as banal. (Mashrabov told me one piece of feedback he’s received was how important professional voice acting was for a film, and “clearly this was missing here.”)
Even if the film was made by a legion of human directors and writers (about 15 people and 30 AI agents worked within the platform on “Hell Grind,” Mashrabov told me), with the script largely written before the film entered production, it still didn’t feel human. But that doesn’t mean it won’t get there eventually.
Mashrabov told me his company is investing its resources into its platform — which already sees thousands of users — so that creators can streamline their workflow and into a large-scale educational course on the best ways to create AI video using Higgsfield’s tools. An ideal use case, he said, was for directors to edit scenes in post-production that would’ve normally cost a hefty sum in reshoots or for creatives to routinely return to Higgsfield to create things like advertisements — and, therefore, pay Higgsfield for such usage. The company’s valuation reached $1.3 billion earlier this year, and its annual revenue run rate hit $400 million last month.
And AI isn’t going anywhere, he told me. “Everyone is trying to figure out what are the use cases and creative formats where it makes sense,” he said.
The end of “Hell Grind” teases a sequel, which isn’t an active project Higgsfield is working on and, given the plot alone, isn’t necessarily one I’d want to see. But in an era where big-budget blockbusters have typically taken years between productions, we may see one in a much shorter period of time — one that looks, and feels, decidedly more human.