Luca Guadagnino’s eleventh film arrives as one of the most unsettling and politically urgent biopics in recent cinema history.
“Artificial” follows OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, who launched AI chatbot ChatGPT in 2022, triggering a global arms race involving Grok, Gemini, and Claude.
Some leading scientists have claimed the power and potential of these programmes means they could destroy humanity by the end of the 2020s.
A decade ago that would have been the stuff of science fiction, but in autumn 2026, the film feels terrifyingly prescient and impossible to dismiss.
Andrew Garfield delivers a psychopathically cocksure impression of Altman, nailing the businessman’s frenetic energy through gyrating hips, Cheshire cat grins, and skyward glances.
Garfield conveys how Altman is impossible to decipher, blurring the line between performative confidence and something that might, just about, be humanity.
Guadagnino uses dreamlike sequences involving Altman and OpenAI chief scientific officer and co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who pioneered the technology but later warned of its unethical effects.
In one trippy scene, the duo hike through the San Francisco hills, the camera blurring out of focus during Altman’s ramblings, conveying his profound emotional distance.
Altman is presented as unable to properly express love for his partner Oliver, yet adored in a messianic way by OpenAI staffers, who at one point chant “feel the AI” as they carry him upstairs.
Ike Barinholtz’s campy portrayal of Elon Musk, all peace signs and pouty faces, will surely infuriate the Grok founder, who worked with Altman during ChatGPT’s early days.
Writer Simon Rich, who based much of the film on conversations with a friend who works at OpenAI, writes clearly in the voices of these giants, though the physical impressions ultimately steal the show.
Yura Borisov is magnetic as Ilya, at emotional boiling point as he argues endlessly with Altman that OpenAI must maintain its not-for-profit status rather than sprint recklessly forward.
Their friendship might be platonic, but Altman and Sutskever’s relationship is no less compelling than the heartbreak at the centre of “Call Me By Your Name,” Guadagnino’s most celebrated work.
Mark Rylance is quietly magnificent as Geoffrey Hinton, the principled academic and moral compass through whom employees discover that sentient AI need not be superior to humans, just flawed like us.
With “rogue” AI agents already threatening online security and the UK’s AI minister warning of an “inevitable” AI attack on the country, this film could not arrive at a more urgent moment.
“Artificial” played at the London Film Festival and is released in UK cinemas on 22 January, destined to be the defining talking-point film of the year.