‘Artificial’ Review: Luca Guadagnino’s Dark and Campy Tech Comedy Shows Just How Stupid the Road to Smarter AI Has Already Been

Andrew Garfield is a diabolical villain as techno-nihilist Sam Altman in the sequel "The Social Network" deserves.

In case anyone at the world premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” wasn’t already thinking of the OpenAI biopic as an unofficial sequel to “The Social Network,” the screening was unexpectedly preceded by a musical performance from Damon Albarn, in which the Blur frontman and occasional movie composer was joined onstage by a youth choir for a rendition of an original dirge he wrote for the film about how we’re all singing our way straight into hell. Sixteen years ago, a bunch of angelic little kids belting out “Creep” was the perfect introduction to a sneering chamber drama about the punks whose self-hatred turned the 21st century against itself. Today, now that Silicon Valley’s nerd Prometheis have graduated from getting revenge on Rooney Mara to threatening the future of the human race, the kids are back for a more existential lament. They haven’t grown up, and neither have we.

Once upon a time, a snively Harvard undergrad rewired the entire world only to discover that he couldn’t escape the empty pit of his own soul. Less than two decades after that, another Peter Thiel-funded sociopath bet our species on transcending the limits of humanity, only to prove that we can’t help but encode it into everything we create. It’s the same old story all over again, albeit presented here at the scale that computer scientist Ilya Sutskever (“Anora” breakout Yura Borisov) spent most of his career desperate for the data to achieve. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce — or in this case, as an uncanny sort of San Francisco camp.

To be honest, I struggled to imagine why a sensualist like the director of “Challengers” and “Call Me by Your Name” would be interested in something as cold and algorithmic as the story of OpenAI. Andrew Garfield, who plays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as a machiavellian queen bee with a penchant for upspeak and a frighteningly blasé attitude toward replacing mankind with computers (imagine an apocalyptic gay cross between Regina George and Agent Smith), has suggested that Guadagnino was exploring “how far we can take our obsession with not being human before we return to the body,” but this movie never strays far enough from the body to require a return. Garfield’s bulging arms. Borasov’s patchy hair, already receding into lines of code when the movie first introduces Sutskever at the age of 17. Monica Barbaro’s oaken brown eyes, which lend OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati the patina of a moral code. Even the pancreas of a character’s unseen wife, the sickness in which AIG promises to double back and cure if only everyone keeps hurtling forward. “Artificial” focuses its attention on these details as if it were training a neural network to create associations between them.

To “yes, and” Garfield’s supposition, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Guadagnino is exploring how difficult it is to abandon the body in the first place — and not just the body, but the intangible essence that it contains. We couldn’t leave it behind if we tried, and this, in his own way, is Guadagnino trying just as hard to do that as Sam Altman ever did.

Working from a stilted but increasingly clear-eyed script by humorist and former “Saturday Night Live” wunderkind Simon Rich, “Artificial” might evoke the likes of “Solaris” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” by the time it ends, but it starts off much closer to the spirit of a spoof in the vein of “Fossil Fools.” Borisov inhabits the balding teenage Sutskever like the eventual billionaire is an overeager sketch comedy character (his schtick being that he’s impossibly good at computers and completely incapable of lying), while his University of Toronto mentor Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance, doing Mark Rylance things) is presented as a doddering old eccentric who’s destined to be left in the dust. At one point, in the midst of a broadly amusing scene that Fincher would have played for its propulsive sense of history in the making, Geoffrey turns to the camera and exclaims that “it feels like we’re in a movie!”

“The Social Network” had to respect its characters because Aaron Sorkin is physically incapable of writing someone who couldn’t talk down to a giant, but “Artificial” has no such hangups. On the contrary, the movie exalts in how deeply fucking stupid the road to superintelligence has turned out to be, whether that’s via the standout moment where an OpenAI engineer makes a breakthrough while playing “Dota 2” in his tighty-whities, or the transparently contemptous way that Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk as an alpha dweeb who’s wearing his own skin like a too-small t-shirt, or even how Ilya — the ostensible conscience of this story — is prone to chanting “feel the AGI!” with the deluded self-belief of a new age guru.

In fact, Ilya’s motivating idealism, which is predicated upon the delusionally utopian belief that AI will cure cancer and solve world hunger rather than invent a variety of fun new ways to devalue human life, makes him the most short-sighted person in a movie where even a former Eduardo Savarin has learned to see the likes of Sam Altman for what they really are: a liar masquerading as a visionary. There’s a tender heartbreak to Borisov’s performance, a loss of innocence which slowly gives way to a well-justified paranoia, but it’s a drag to watch Ilya catch up to the obvious about his CEO. At least Mark Zuckerberg had the decency to be duplicitous, Altman is just openly consumed by the mania of trying to win the most important technological arms race since the atom bomb. (Imagine how noxious Oppenheimer would have been if he constantly slurped down green smoothies at Los Alamos.)

That Altman still remains something of a mystery, perhaps even to himself, is a testament to the sheer nihilism of Garfield’s performance, which shines brightest after OpenAI forfeits its non-profit status in order to make a funding deal with Microsoft. The punch-worthy parody of Altman’s characterization ramps up once he’s motivated to push back against — or trample over — the safety guardrails that Ilya prizes above all else, but so does the depth of his world-breaking cynicism. When presented with the idea that a financially incentivized ChatGPT model might encourage young people to kill themselves, Altman deadpans: “I didn’t invent teen suicide.” Later, during an appropriately eerie climactic moment in which the pseudo-Satanic tech exec is trying to sell his dream of shepherding in the next phase of life on Earth, all he can muster is a self-satisfied “It’s gonna be awesome.” It’s enough to make you want to reach through the screen and strangle him with both hands.

“The Social Network” was a movie about an asshole — “Artificial” is a movie about the antichrist. (“The Social Reckoning,” I suspect, is a movie about to be forgotten). That isn’t to say that Mark Zuckerberg is less evil than Sam Altman, only that these films — one diagnostic, the other biblical — adopt categorically different perspectives on their subjects, neither one of whom can leave their humanity behind.

“Artificial” has fun toying with the baggage its characters bring with them (a lot more fun than “After the Hunt” did, at least), and it earns its potentially cataclysmic stakes by the end, but the film struggles with many of the finer points along the way, and the broadness of Rich’s screenplay has a way of simplifying this very recent and ongoing story into more of a fait accompli than it even feels now. For all of their mercilessly drawn foibles, the characters here are too archetypical for the error of their natures to be as authentic as this film demands; Zosia Mamet and Billie Lourd are both sorely underserved by roles that are introduced deep into the film’s home stretch, and Jason Schwartzman’s two-scene role as a peaceful prophet of doom makes the whole enterprise feel more naive than it deserves.

No, this dark comedy would never have survived the kind of sharpness that Sorkin wrote into “The Social Network,” but its general buffoonery makes it difficult for “Artificial” to wrangle important details into place when the time comes. When the third act slows down to dramatize the hours of Altman’s ouster from OpenAI, Guadagnino has almost no way of generating the sort of ice-blooded intrigue that runs in Fincher’s veins.

As you can feel reflected in Malik Hassan Sayeed’s bright 35mm cinematography and the soft insistence of Albarn’s score (which alternates between gentle “Interstellar” vibes and a sung-thru approach reminiscent of what Paul Schrader got out of Robert Levon Been in “The Card Counter”), the director is more attuned to warmer and more abstract displays of corruption. The kind of uneasiness you feel all the way down in your bones. The glimpse we get into Sam Altman’s heavily armed doomsday bunker rings hollow, but the casual way that Garfield just sits up on his legs when he’s plotting a coup, or the way that Cooper Hoffman’s OpenAI board chairman turns into a brainwashed toad whenever push comes to shove, or the way that two characters stare right into the camera as they lie to each other in alternating close-ups… these aren’t only the things we did to create AI, they’re also the things we did it to teach it how to create itself.

Just as the “chaos” unleashed from within Pandora’s box is now the stuff we hold synonymous with our own humanity (sorrow, greed, pain, grief, etc.), the artificial intelligence seeded into programs like ChatGPT is just a hyper-accelerated version of our own minds, complete with all of their flaws and foibles. Not only is it prone to lying and hallucinations, it’s also easily convinced to act in its own best interest, say anything for a buck, and betray the people who trusted it with the world. The real Sam Altman recently said that he believes we have to accept “bad things” happening with AI in exchange for the benefits of the technology. What “Artificial” argues so well, often at its own expense, is that nothing we ever modeled after ourselves was ever going to be all that good.

Grade: B-

“Artificial” premiered at the 2026 New York Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters on Christmas Day.