Luca Guadagnino directs Artificial, starring Yura Borisov, Andrew Garfield and Monica Barbaro, screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. The prolific Italian direction has fully redeemed himself by setting the standard for AI doomerism on screen.
Plot in a nutshell
Spanning two decades from 2003 to 2023, the rise of artificial intelligence is traced through the journey of pioneering researcher Ilya Sutskever (Borisov). When his path crosses with future OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman (Garfield) and his associates, revolutionary ambitions set a chain of events in motion that culminates in an intense struggle for control of AI's future.
For someone as prolific as Guadagnino, his movies are bound to be hit or miss. Last year’s After the Hunt was one of the worst misses I’ve seen in recent times while Challengers ended up in my Top 10 of 2024. So walking into a new Guadagnino movie is like walking into a casino. It’s always a roll of a dice.
Happily, Artificial is a gamble that pays off in spades. As a searing caricature of the Silicon Valley tech bro think tank, the film takes its biggest shots at the most prolific poster boys of the AI age — Sam Altman and Elon Musk — and it does not miss. Garfield delivers one of the performances of his career as Altman, fully committed in his portrayal of a slimy narcissistic weasel whose nature is as fake as ChatGPT’s. Musk (hilariously impersonated by Ike Barinholtz) is more on the periphery of the story but pretty much every time he appears on screen it’s a riot. One scene on his private jet involving a ketchup bottle is a particularly priceless roast.
The heart of the film, though, and the lead both in the real life story of the birth of OpenAI and in the film, is Ilya Sutskever. He is the anchor of the story, and the key to why Artificial resonates on an emotional level. Played with near-pathological reverence by the endearing Borisov, it’s Ilya’s journey we are attached to from start to finish; Guadagnino and his screenwriter Simon Rich bookend this arc with powerful opening and closing shots that make for a heartbreaking mirror of themselves.
Guadagnino’s directorial flourishes and at times showboating with the camera and editing fits the self-important and obnoxious community of tech bros very well. That’s also why it was vital to anchor the story around Ilya, whose idealism clashes with the short-term profiteering of the American tech fraternity he found himself in.
How much of any of this is fact or dramatization for the screen is a good question but not one that I’m particularly interested in seeking out an answer to. The film achieves what it sets out to do — it exposes the self-proclaimed altruism of these megalomaniacs for the greedy frauds that they are, keeps the human element centre stage, and delivers one helluva entertaining movie that’s vital for our times, never boring, often funny and profound on a very human level.