Artificial

Luca Guadagnino returns to form with an engaging, unsettling chronicle of OpenAI’s rise, anchored by outstanding performances from Andrew Garfield and Yura Borisov.

After the Hunt was one of my least favourite films at the last London Film Festival and one of the most disappointing, given how much I admire some of Guadagnino’s other work. Artificial, however, ranks among my festival favourites, combining a thrilling tone with moments that are both funny and terrifying. Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, while Yura Borisov portrays Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder and chief scientific officer who ousted Altman as CEO in 2023. The ensemble also features Monica Barbaro as chief technology officer Mira Murati; Cooper Hoffmann as OpenAI co-founder and current president Greg Brockman; Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI”; and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is its casting: this outstanding ensemble delivers some of the year’s best all-round acting. Andrew Garfield gives one of his finest performances and deserves at least an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor; it is certainly among my favourites of the year so far. He plays Altman with an easy, blasé manner, using a soft voice, eccentric gestures, and impish behaviour to appear harmless. Yet Garfield gradually reveals how subtly manipulative, selfish, and incompetent Altman truly is. In contrast, Borisov portrays Sutskever as socially awkward but bright-eyed, earnest, and idealistic about AI, making him easy to root for. Watching these opposing personalities develop is compelling, culminating in Altman’s 2023 dismissal and rehiring only days later, much to Sutskever’s outrage. Their final scene perfectly encapsulates the film: throughout, Sutskever seems to be escaping a cult and mounting a coup against its charismatic leader, Altman.

The supporting cast also play their parts well. Monica Barbaro adopts a convincing Albanian-American accent as Mira Murati, whose growing awareness of Altman’s danger and untrustworthiness becomes central to her arc. However, a late confrontation in which Sutskever challenges Murati over Altman’s rehiring deliberately leaves the audience frustrated by both the outcome and her role in it. Mark Rylance portrays Geoffrey Hinton as a guiding voice on AI, warning against reckless development and its use by the wrong people. As the film’s moral and emotional anchor, he contrasts sharply with Altman, Cooper Hoffmann’s brash Greg Brockman, and Ike Barinholtz’s caricatured Elon Musk, whose scenes provide comic relief and present him as a pathetic figure.

Simon Rich’s script is packed with technical jargon, which could have become tedious over the film’s 140-minute runtime. Instead, the energy, pace, and tension keep it engaging, allowing the characters’ personalities and the script’s themes to take centre stage. Damon Albarn, best known as Blur’s lyricist and the co-creator of Gorillaz, provides a synth-driven score that gives the film a distinctive modern dystopian atmosphere, making it one of my favourite scores of the year.

It is no exaggeration to call Artificial the most important and frightening film I have seen this year, largely because of its subject matter. It charts AI’s development from its origins to the 2020s, making the 2014–19 timeline feel surreal: those years seem so recent, yet the technology has advanced dramatically since then. With some events taking place only two or three years ago, the film feels strikingly current, and its story is still unfolding before us. Artificial also suggests that AI is inevitable and could be beneficial if developed responsibly with rigorous safety checks. The horror lies in knowing that many companies are instead accelerating development in an AI arms race, raising unsettling questions about where the technology may lead in the next few years and what that will mean for society.

The film’s main weaknesses are that its technical jargon can be difficult to follow and its rapid pace sometimes rushes through events. Many have compared it to The Social Network, and while Artificial feels like a spiritual sequel, a 2020s counterpart, it lacks some of that film’s sharp filmmaking and razor-edged editing. Even so, The Social Network’s tone perfectly captured the rise of Facebook and social media from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, just as Artificial’s tone suits the early 2020s and the present day.

Overall, Artificial is one of my favourite films of the year and among my favourites by Guadagnino. Garfield and Borisov deliver outstanding performances, while the script and tone make it exceptionally relevant. Both thrilling and horrifying, the film is an enthralling yet frustrating watch that raises urgent questions about where AI is taking us. It is easy to see why Amazon dropped the film’s distribution after agreeing to a $50 million deal with OpenAI.