For the last two weeks, I’ve been having a great time at the Cannes Film Festival. I’ve seen some incredible films (catch up with our reviews HERE), and overall, my first trip to the festival has been fabulous. But simultaneous to the festival itself, there’s another major event happening on La Croisette: the Cannes Market. Here, independent distributors and production companies gather to pitch projects and strike deals, with several major acquisitions already emerging from this year’s market (often – the makers say their movie screened “in Cannes,” but really they mean the city, and NOT the festival, as the screenings are independently booked and unaffiliated with the festival itself).
One aspect of the market that has always been a mystery to journalists is the invite-only screenings. To my surprise, I received an invitation to one such event. Normally, I would skip these screenings, but I have to admit I was intrigued. The invite was for what was being touted as a full-length AI-generated feature film.
Usually, that’s exactly the kind of thing I’d avoid, as I remain deeply skeptical about AI being used to create entire feature films. However, we debuted the trailer for the movie, Hell Grind, as an exclusive earlier this week (embedded above), and I have to admit I was curious. What would an entire feature created on an AI platform (Higgsfield AI) actually look like?
So, I went in with an open mind. And with all due respect to the filmmakers behind the project, after seeing the movie, I’m even less convinced about AI-generated features than I was before.
The reality is that the technology, while evolving quickly, is still in its infancy. It’s possible that one day fully AI-generated movies will become indistinguishable from traditionally made films — as unsettling as that idea may be — but Hell Grind screamed “AI” from beginning to end.
The film is essentially a riff on Solarbabies, centering on four skateboarding orphans who are now adults. During a heist, they discover an ancient artifact that grants them superpowers, but also drags one of them into the “underworld,” forcing the remaining trio to rescue her.
The characters look human — but not quite. The eyes, at least to me, were the biggest giveaway. Had I not known the film was AI-generated, would I have figured it out? Hard to say. I’d like to think so, but it’s entirely possible I would have been fooled at first glance.
Still, other issues immediately stood out. The frame rate constantly jitters, the production design and VFX resemble an extended video game cutscene, and the action scenes have little sense of choreography, weight, or creativity.
Apparently, the entire film was generated in just two weeks for roughly $500,000. To the filmmakers’ credit, they did manage to keep the character designs relatively consistent throughout — although one character randomly develops a British accent before abruptly switching back.
Ironically, the one thing apparently not generated by AI was the screenplay. And that’s where one of the film’s biggest problems emerges.
Director/writer Actor Zholdaskali, who co-wrote the script with Adilkhan Yerzhanov, either used AI to generate portions of the dialogue or relied heavily on AI translation (the filmmakers are from Kazakhstan), because the dialogue is always painfully awkward and unintentionally hilarious.
One Black character punctuates nearly every sentence with “yo” and “dawg,” as though the filmmakers were trying to recreate American slang based entirely on the most cliché stereotypes imaginable – or typed in “make the dialogue sound street” or something to that effect. Much of the dialogue feels like it was written without a strong command of English, and honestly, the movie probably would have worked better in the filmmakers’ native language.
Instead, the unnatural dialogue makes the already artificial-looking characters feel even more fake.
To cut the people behind Hell Grind some slack, this is essentially a proof of concept. While it’s technically feature-length, it’s clearly structured more like a web series, divided neatly into roughly twenty-minute segments.
The technology is advancing rapidly, but what these filmmakers are doing — generating an entire movie through AI — is very different from what filmmakers like Doug Liman are experimenting with on projects like his Bitcoin movie, where AI is being used alongside real actors, writers, and craftspeople. It’s also different from the hybrid approach directors like Roger Avary have discussed.
That distinction matters.
If filmmakers eventually combine real actors, writers, cinematographers, editors, and technicians with AI-assisted tools, it’s possible something genuinely interesting could emerge. Whether that’s good or bad for the industry remains to be seen, but it does feel inevitable that AI will become part of the process in some capacity.
What Hell Grind ultimately feels like, however, is less like a movie and more like an experiment — or perhaps a rough sketch of where this technology could eventually lead.
That alone made it something I wanted to get eyes on. But as an actual film experience, I found it tedious, and it doesn’t come close to matching even the weakest movies made by real human beings.