DUCK is a daring deepfake short that follows Sean Connery’s unravelling after he witnesses Marilyn Monroe’s return from the dead. Set within the recognisable world of a British spy thriller, DUCK’s main protagonist, a deepfake Connery, plays out the role he knows all too well: collecting clues, wrong-footing assailants, and eliminating the femme fatale, only to find that not all is what it seems. Monroe is the glamourous siren and a thorn in Connery’s side; unlike him, she understands the power that comes with being just an image—an appropriation of femininity and sexuality largely defined by men—and she uses her endlessly mutable image to her own manipulative gain.

DUCK is unique in entirely using deepfake video and audio to resurrect actors through machine-learning. Visually captivating, funny, and technically innovative, DUCK takes elements from classic Hollywood, video games, film noir, and sci-fi to raise compelling questions about truth and power.

Deepfake is a technology perceived as inherently duplicitous, and as such, is the perfect mechanism to pose questions, not just about AI, but about how veracity is perceived in images and film more generally. The film was created as part of a cross-disciplinary research project between Newcastle University and Edinburgh University that examines creative applications of AI-generated video and audio. Researchers developed a cutting-edge text-to-speech model to learn the voices of the specific actors. This allowed Maclean to record an original script using, in some cases, long dead talent. Consequently, there is the uncomfortable feeling when watching the film of being haunted by the phantoms of old cinema.

Maclean plays every character in DUCK, often performing in a style deliberately unlike the original actors; Sean Connery looks frequently awkward, nervous, or uncomfortable in his own skin. Green-screen and 3D modelling were used to create a richly detailed “hyper-real” environment, while the grade imitates 35mm film stock, establishing an intentionally ambiguous sense of place and time.

Maclean’s films and artwork take recognisable tropes from popular culture and the media as material to invert and subvert, challenging the “truth” we are presented with through a patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist lens. DUCK is no exception—by resurrecting Marilyn Monroe as an indestructible self-aware AI, Maclean flips the script on the cult of masculinity, cliches of female sexuality and gender power dynamics. She pushes the tenets of postmodernism to an absurd conclusion: realities within realities with seemingly no epistemological foundation. Indeed, as Connery says in one scene “none of this makes sense”.