To cleanse the palate, an unnerving late-night deepfake. I approve of a YouTube commenter’s suggestion to follow this up by swapping Jack Nicholson’s face onto Carrey’s in the “rhino” scene in Ace Ventura 2.

What makes this work so well, I think, is partly the technology and partly the inspiration of casting Carrey as Jack Torrance. The face-mapping is stellar; if you didn’t know the film (or Carrey’s voice) you would certainly take the clip at face value, no pun intended. But it’s effective too because it’s surprisingly easy to imagine Carrey in this role. The sense one typically gets watching Nicholson is of a pressure vessel that’s straining and liable to burst. The sense one gets watching Carrey is more of a fireworks show, periodically going off in every direction. (Go figure that Carrey is known for comedy.) Each is an unstable reaction happening before your eyes, which makes them compelling to watch. Go figure that you might think of Carrey when recasting a character who’s one blizzard away from threatening his family with an axe.

Can you imagine what these clips will be like when they nail down the voice technology too? The vocal mismatch is the only thing stopping this from being a true actor-for-actor substitution in an iconic film.

The guy who made this, by the way, turns out to be the same guy who made that Bill Hader/Arnold Schwarzenegger clip I posted a few weeks ago. That wasn’t the only time he’s had some fun with Hader’s impressions either. Watch the second clip below for the witchy effect achieved when Hader suddenly morphs into Al Pacino. (I think it’s the fact that their hair’s similar in color that makes it so good.) This guy has a page full of other deepfakes, with new ones coming every day. As far as anyone knows, he’s an amateur. This is what amateurs can do now.