There is a trick you can play as a publicist. Arrange an event, a screening, a prize-giving in Cannes during the annual film festival, then release a press release announcing your star, film, client appeared, debuted, was honoured at Cannes and hope the story will be repeated and kudos awarded.
Kevin Spacey received an award at Cannes this way a few years ago. Not from the actual festival, but who’s going to check?
And so I received an email inviting me to the premiere of a film at Cannes – the town, not the festival – for a new film called Hell Grind. This fully AI-generated movie cost $500,000 and took two weeks to create with a team of 15 professional “directors, DPs, and editors,” according to Alex Mashrabov, founder of Higgsfield AI, the generative software on which the film was created.
“The traditional comparable production cost is around $50M,” Mashrabov, a former Snapchat staffer, boasted on LinkedIn, which might be true. Or not.
A quick check of IMDbPro showed absolutely no-one credited for making the film. Zilch. Nobody. Not even the director and writers mentioned in the email.
According to the publicity, the film was directed by Kazakhstan-born Aitore Zholdaskali, a former music video maker whose most recent movie was hard-boiled thriller Sicko (2026). Hell Grind was written by him and Adilkhan Yerzhanov, though Zholdaskali doesn’t have the film listed on his IMDb page either.
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It’s unclear if writing the screenplay was included in the two-week production timespan, and whether or not it also included AI involvement. Judging by the trailer, I’d say they probably took at least a morning.
In the plot, a band of street thieves botch a street heist, leading to one of their group being seized and taken to the underworld. Her companions join forces with a military group to fight the demons and rescue their companion. For comedy, there’s a robot in drag and a demon that farts.
A Wall Street Journal article that reads more like an infomercial talks up the production process – a written prompt of 3,000 words for each 15 seconds of video; 16,181 initial video generations for the first 25 minutes of film. The journalist seems happily incurious about the fact she’s talking to a Higgsfield staffer, “content lead” Adil Alimzhanov, rather than the director.
“You have to understand camera composition, which shots are changed,” he says. “Like you can’t have two close-ups back to back, you have to start with an establishing shot […] You still need those filmmaking skills.” Floating props are not a good idea, he also reassures us. Because of, you know, gravity.
The trailer which accompanied the email announced that the screening was on “May the 21th” so you’ll excuse me if I don’t pledge my loyalty to our technological overlords just yet. Wait until the fuckers find out about the Oxford comma.
I’m one of a diminishing number, though. A colleague of mine who sat through the screening said it was shit, but still better than Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell. I guess they could put that on the poster.
Meanwhile, Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, The Whale) was in town to talk up his new AI-powered documentary series On This Day… 1776, which looked terrible. Cannes jury member Demi Moore also caused consternation when she told the press: “AI is here. And so to fight it is to fight something that is a battle that we will lose.” I mean, cancer is here; fascism is here. A lot of things are here.
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This kind of acceptance is growing across the industry. Sex, Lies and Videotape director Steven Soderbergh – and where Soderbergh goes there goes Hollywood – included AI sections in his new documentary John Lennon: the Last Interview, which also showed at Cannes. He defended the technology, comparing it to the drum machine.
“We still have drummers,” he observed. To which I’d reply: go back to the 1980s and try your hand as a session drummer in the dawn of the drum machine.
But Soderbergh, Moore, my friend (it was Ed Potton of The Times, don’t tell him I told you), are all nodding towards the inevitability of a future, but that inevitably is part of a narrative being pushed by entities which are not themselves unbiased in their predictions.
Higgsfield is a company valued at $1.4 billion and needs business to increase to support that valuation. As such, Hell Grind does not need to be a good film. It just needs to be cheap and good enough. It’s a 95-minute sizzle reel that has scraped everything that’s out there in order to produce a cliché-encrusted film experience, just in the way a sex worker might be hired to give you a Girlfriend Experience (Soderbergh again) rather than the relationship itself.
As a pioneer, its quality is moot. Let’s face it the Lumiere Brothers film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat was a bit of a snore. The train arrives at the station, people get off, people mill around: no jokes, no car chases, no characters, no story. The Lumiere Brothers themselves thought it was a bit shit, seeing their invention – cinema – as having no real practical application.
Who’d want to sit down in a dark theatre watching trains enter stations when you can see the real thing by going to the railway station? Likewise, the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, was a rotten film with a blacked-up Al Jolson warbling about his Mammy. Yikes! Paging racist Freud.
So why does Hell Grind grind on my nerves? Am I just a Luddite, pining for session drummers even though famed drummer Phil Collins used a drum machine? Am I a Japanese soldier on a Pacific island fighting an AI Lee Marvin though the war has been over for decades? Why do my bowels turn to water and my mouth fill with dust when I see that Val Kilmer is going to “star” in a new film called As Deep As the Grave despite being… dead?
I think it’s because if my art is going to be bad, I want it to be human bad. If I want a shite fantasy film, Deathstalker and Krull will do the job nicely, thank you. Nicolas Winding Refn might make bad films, but at least they’re uniquely Nicolas Winding Refn bad.
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AI is going to have a role in our lives and culture – although has anyone noticed how it’s dropped its cancer cure boasts recently? It is the future, the boosters say. But a lot of things are going to be the future that are also going to be cuntish and foul.
Being the future is not an a priori good thing. At one point in our history, death camps and germ warfare were a thing of the future. CGI was once a thing of the future. Has it made films better, or just cheaper? And cheaper looking?
Art is about humans communicating with humans about the experience of being human. AI gives us a second-guessing version of that, a shortcut when the journey is the point. It is an environmental disaster; a thief of intellectual property and identity; and, if uncontrolled, it will limit what it means to be human to the basest of basic algorithmic tendencies.
In the attention economy, it will narrow the splinter-like gap true human art has to get through to the audience. Books on Amazon written by AI and songs on Spotify are already a plague. These platforms have been predesigned as a circular intestine to keep the Enshitification 2.0 of life in perpetual motion.
AI will eat us and let out a series of small, demonic smell-less farts.
John Bleasdale’s novel Connery is published by Plumeria
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