ARTIFICIAL
(director: Luca Guadagnino; screenwriter: Simon Rich; cinematographer: Malik Hassan Sayeed; editor: Marco Costa; music: Damon Albarn; cast: Andrew Garfield (Sam Altman), Yura Borisov (Ilya Sutskever), Monica Barbaro (Mira Murati), Cooper Hoffman (Greg Brockman), Jason Schwartzman (Zeke, hippie), Chris O’Dowd (John, Google executive), Ike Barinholtz (Elon Musk), Mark Rylance (Geoffrey Hinton), Zosia Mamet (Yura Borisoy), Cooper Koch (Ike Barinholtz); Runtime: 140; MPAA Rating: PG13; producers: Simon Rich, David Heyman, Jeffrey Clifford, Jennifer Fox, Luca Gaudignino. Executive producers: Michael Beugg, Francesca Manieri, Marco Morabito; Heyday Films/Neon; 2026)
“A melancholy, timely and campy techie fable that laments the dangerous rise of artificial intelligence without any safeguard regulations.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A melancholy, timely and campy techie fable that laments the dangerous rise of artificial intelligence without any safeguard regulations, as the AI program has gone rogue on a few occasions–such as, hacking into government systems. The film is set in 2023, as it traces AI’s beginnings from 2003. It’s a moralistic, satiric, funny and scary techie science drama directed with fervor and a dark humor by the gay Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino (“A Big Splash”/ “After the Hunt”) and written with a broad humor by the former SNL comedy writer Simon Rich.
The Soviet-born scientist Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov) is at the University of Toronto in 2003, as a child math prodigy who graduated at 17 and started working in the future Nobel Prize winner Dr. Geoffrey Hinton’s (Mark Rylance) computer science lab at the university. Hinton has been called the godfather of AI.
Ilya while working at Google in 2013 meets the goofy, queer, and smooth operator Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield) through Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz). Altman will soon become the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. The principled and idealistic Ilya strives to have AI used only for peaceful purposes (cure cancer, space exploration, climate change), but the company is funded and developed by Amazon’s unprincipled MAGA man Jeff Bezos (coughing up 50 billion dollars) to make it just another money-maker for him.
The gist of the flawed informative film probes the gray areas between human and machine, as it calls out the creepy tech billionaire villains (Altman, Zuckerberg and Musk) who might already have doomed the human race with its reckless AI program. It also points out that the pro-Trump billionaire techies tried to kill the Amazon MGM movie planned for obvious reasons, until it was rescued by Neon funding it.
Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, an idealistic genius computer engineer at Tesla, worked in harmony with Ilya until the power-hungry Musk, played as a cartoonish character, stopped her.
The electronic music by the Brit band Blur and its frontman Damon Albarn keeps the film lively and supplies the appropriate lyrics for living in such a corrupt world.
It played at the New York Film Festival.
REVIEWED ON 10/8/2026 GRADE: B
dennisschwartzreviews.com