Hell Grind

Hell Grind is a 95-minute English-language action-fantasy feature, released in 2026 and billed as the first feature film created entirely on the Higgsfield AI platform. It was made by the San Francisco-based AI video company Higgsfield, directed by the Kazakh filmmaker Aitore Zholdaskali and co-written with Adilkhan Yerzhanov. It can be watched on Higgsfield's own site, where it is released as episodes of roughly 22 to 25 minutes, and on YouTube, where the full film carries an upload date of 4 August 2026.

By Higgsfield's account every frame was generated, with no cameras, actors or sets. A team of about 15 directors, editors and prompt engineers, mostly working in person from Almaty, produced it in 14 days for under $500,000, roughly $400,000 of that compute. Higgsfield's brief names Seedance 2.0 for video and speech, Soul Cinema for faces and locations, Nano Banana Pro and Seedream 4.5 for image edits and GPT Image 2 for in-frame text; CineD adds Soul Cast, Cinema Studio 3.5 and some Google Veo 3. Prompts ran to around 3,000 words with physics written in, such as no floating props, and the first 25 minutes took 16,181 generations to yield 253 shots. Variety reports that all but one of the songs were AI-generated too.

Zholdaskali's 2025 feature Sicko played Rotterdam and SXSW London, and Yerzhanov has twice appeared in Cannes official programmes, according to CineD, which also names the UK finance and production outfit Goldfinch as a partner. Higgsfield's CEO Alex Mashrabov has described part of the process as having a feeling of a slot machine.

A teaser was shown at an industry event Higgsfield co-hosted in Cannes on 16 May 2026, and the film screened at the Cinema Olympia on 21 May, around the Marche du Film rather than in the festival programme. The festival told Futurism it was not in its official selection, so claims of a Cannes premiere are disputed. Closed screenings followed in Bishkek on 17 June and, per the stored record, in New York. In early August the full film went up on Higgsfield's platform and YouTube, and the prompts, character models and assets were then open-sourced as the showcase for the company's Global Film Festival. YouTube's upload had 491,258 views on 2 October 2026 and Higgsfield's platform 592,581 on 6 October, together about 1.08 million; the trailer had 231,959 views on YouTube on 6 October.

Reviewers praised the consistency of the faces and movement and were unconvinced by the rest. Variety called the plot nonsensical while noting the lifelike characters, the demon's single expression and flat line readings, and Mashrabov conceded that professional voice acting was missing. JoBlo's Chris Bumbray wrote that it screamed AI from start to finish, and CineD described a rough reception, though director Chuck Russell found the characters charming. CineD called Higgsfield's claim that a comparable traditional film would cost about $50 million unverified. The ending teases a sequel that Higgsfield says is not in development.

CineD argues that the production pipeline, not the Cannes positioning, is what working filmmakers should study, in particular the ratio of generations kept and the physics written into the prompts. Coverage presents it as the first feature-length film built entirely on one AI platform.