The NYFF premiere of Luca Guadagnino ‘s Artificial, which is set for a theatrical release in December, comes one year after the NYFF premiere of the director’s previous live-action feature, After the Hunt.
Unlike the previous film, which was highly criticized for its handling of its timely and sensitive subject matter, the new one seems to be predestined for almost universal praise based solely on the fact that this time the object of the author’s ire is something pretty much everyone agrees can easily destroy humanity in the near future.
It probably won’t matter much that Artificial, while slightly more focused than its predecessor, still shares many of its flaws.
Somewhere in the early aughts, Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance), a brilliant computer scientist, is all but ambushed by a younger, but also brilliant scientist, Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov) – obviously, it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship. A few years later, Hinton and Ilya sell their AI startup for a cool 44 million to Google. But Ilya has a vision for the further development of AI and the speed with which it should happen that no one around him shares. This makes it easier for Ilya to fall under the spell of Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield), an aspiring entrepreneur who is all about the vision of catching a golden opportunity that no one has yet stumbled upon.
Basing Artificial, at least on the surface level, on the history of OpenAI and the creation of ChatGPT, Guadagnino and screenwriter Simon Rich strive to hit the same spot The Social Network did in 2010 – to look beyond the Wikipedia trivia at the way the subject at hand changes our reality. The way it’s crafted, though, aligns the film with another work Aaron Sorkin not only wrote but also directed, The Social Reckoning; the latter's release actually coinciding with the Artificial premiere at NYFF. While Guadagnino’s film isn’t as inherently messy as Sorkin’s latest, they both are fueled by their authors’ (quite righteous) anger at the carelessness of corporations that rule the world.
Both also operate under the impression that the ideas they explore are enough to sustain a narrative, while mostly ignoring the characters within it. It’s ironic in Sorkin’s case, since depicting deeply flawed, complicated people used to be his specialty, and in his new film, the only thing we know for sure about its protagonist is that she has gluten intolerance. It’s doubly ironic in the case of Artificial, because the whole point of its anti-AI argument is that the dangers of it stem from the moral failures of humans who created it, but there are so very few genuine human interactions in the film.
Borisov’s Ilya is clearly supposed to be the emotional center of this cautionary tale. Instead, the script fails both the character and the actor, relegating the former to a mere function that gets us through the story. Borisov is forced to continuously play Ilya’s only trait – his laser focus on the task at hand, whether he is obsessed with the beauty of his mind and his creation, or later with the catastrophe it is likely to cause. At the start of the film, Borisov plays Ilya as a milder version of Sheldon Cooper, but the back half of the film strips him of any distinctive features, other than being an abstract idea of personified idealism.
Andrew Garfield gets more luck with his character; not so much because the script allows him, but because the phenomenon of his real-life prototype does. While Artificial keeps Sam Altman as just one other obscure figure, Garfield manages to ground him and turn him into a convincing human being, one of those complex, inherently flawed people that the film keeps referencing but fails to show. It’s his performance as a man who is so full of superficial, yet natural charm that you can’t help but wish for him to love you that somewhat glues the film together.
It doesn’t help that Artificial, much like After the Hunt, is based in its own version of reality where everything is made simpler, and more morally and ethically black-and-white. In the previous film, it was a reality where society miraculously and unanimously rushed to support a woman after she made sexual assault allegations. Here, it’s the world where even the supposedly smart people are purposefully dumbed down to make the message as clear as possible. The very on-the-nose parody of Elon Musk (played by Ike Barinholtz) is especially jarring, since this is where the writing loses all pretense of nuance and goes full SNL (which the writer Simon Rich spent several years writing for).
Artificial also draws uncomfortable comparisons to After the Hunt in that Guadagnino’s direction once again doesn’t really support the narrative but rather overwhelms it. For the second time in a row, he seems to throw various stylistic flourishes at the screen and see what sticks. While most of the screen time is dominated by static shots in office interiors, there are also seemingly random bouts of close-ups of characters looking into the camera as if addressing the audience directly, inexplicable downward-spiral shots, and a Hitchcockian-style score.
Still, none of it elevates the script, which has a great point about people in charge of our reality screwing it up for the sake of a pissing contest, but doesn’t know how to get it across without actually showing a scene where a bunch of men are engaged in a pissing contest.
The film enjoyed its world premiere at the 2026 New York Film Festival. Visit the official festival site for more information.