Artificial movie – Director Luca Guadagnino’s latest film takes a scathing look at the rise of OpenAI, painting tech titans as self-absorbed dweebs in a surreal black comedy.
The walk is what gives them away. Ilya Sutskever, played by Yuri Borisov, clomps through the frame like a geeky, modern-day Frankenstein monster. Beside him. Andrew Garfield’s Sam Altman skips and bounces with a boyish energy the real OpenAI CEO recently praised for its startling accuracy. Then there is Ike Barinholtz’s Elon Musk. who maneuvers through rooms of programmers with the loping swagger of an alpha gorilla. his long. pouting expressions mirroring the aesthetic of a Bored Ape NFT.
These are the architects of the artificial intelligence boom. captured not as titans of industry. but as self-regarding. insufferably boring dweebs. During the film’s post-premiere Q&A at the New York Film Festival earlier this week. Barinholtz joked that his character was simply “a person who walks normally.”.
Directed by Luca Guadagnino, *Artificial* arrived at the festival with a heavy cloud of industry tension. Amazon MGM originally held the distribution rights. only to drop the project this summer immediately after securing a $50 billion deal with OpenAI. Independent distributor Neon quickly picked up the film. At the screening, NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim alluded to these “circumstances” while introducing the director on stage.
The friction between the film and its subjects is palpable. While 2010’s *The Social Network* cast Silicon Valley’s founders as architects of a new era. *Artificial* works to strip away that prestige. It portrays the key figures behind the AI explosion as reckless and vain. focusing primarily on Sutskever as both the catalyst of the current wave and its nagging moral conscience. Though Andrew Garfield anchors the project. the narrative serves as a biopic of Sutskever rather than a singular look at Altman.
Guadagnino. best known for his polished style in *Call Me by Your Name* and *Challengers*. trades his usual aesthetic for something deliberately plain. even ugly. He depicts the industry’s “desire to prevail” through sterile. unsexy sequences. such as programmers dousing each other in bottles of Jarritos to celebrate a self-learning benchmark. In its final act. a confrontation between Altman and his associates on a sloping San Francisco street takes on the jarring. artificial quality of a green-screen backdrop reminiscent of *The Room*.
*Artificial* stands in stark contrast to the legacy of the Facebook drama that preceded it. Where David Fincher opted for a steely. wordy. and polished tone. Guadagnino and writer-producer Simon Rich chose the route of a surreal black comedy. While traces of the director’s signature erotic tension remain—most notably in Altman’s seductive attempts to woo Sutskever—the world of the film is largely sexless. It is a portrait of a new power class defined not by vision, but by a hollow, unrelenting ambition.
Artificial movie Luca Guadagnino OpenAI Sam Altman Ilya Sutskever Elon Musk NYFF tech news