I watched a $500K sci-fi thriller with AI actors. It felt real — briefly

For a brief stretch in the middle of Higgsfield AI’s feature Hell Grind, I experienced a raw emotion I didn’t expect: genuine sadness. The male lead, Roco, stares at a photo of his kidnapped love interest and flashes back to childhood memories in an orphanage; the yearning in that moment felt real.

The sensation unraveled when the actors’ behavior slipped into the uncanny — an oddly synchronized laugh, eyes unnaturally wide — during a screening at New York’s Metro Private Cinema. Higgsfield’s 95-minute film premiered in May at the Marché du Film in Cannes and was produced for about $500,000, with much of that sum spent on computing.

The startup, which runs an AI platform for creatives and recently crossed a $1 billion valuation, says Hell Grind is the highest-profile movie made entirely with AI-generated visuals so far. The production relied on in-house creatives and outside filmmakers using very specific text prompts — typically around 3,000 words — to generate roughly 100 hours of footage that was then edited down.

United States, New York

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