{"id":794084,"date":"2026-10-06T20:36:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T20:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/794084\/"},"modified":"2026-10-06T20:36:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T20:36:10","slug":"artificial-review-luca-guadagnino-takes-on-openai-in-muddled-tech-satire-new-york-film-festival-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/794084\/","title":{"rendered":"Artificial review \u2013 Luca Guadagnino takes on OpenAI in muddled tech satire | New York film festival 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the day that Luca Guadagnino<\/a>\u2019s film about Sam Altman<\/a> and OpenAI<\/a> premiered, Vanity Fair released a cover story<\/a> on Altman. Alongside glossy portraits from Annie Leibovitz, the world\u2019s pre-eminent portrait photographer, the story describes him as the Oppenheimer of his day, evoking the image of a man leading humanity towards its own inevitable demise at the hands of sentient robots. Altman doesn\u2019t seem to be grappling with much existential angst about the whole thing though: in an interview<\/a> also released this week, he said that we should be prepared to accept \u201cbad things\u201d in return for the benefits of AI.<\/p>\n

How much worse can things get? AI agents have already gone rogue<\/a>, hacking into government systems and \u201cbruteforcing\u201d UN databases. Last year<\/a>, a young woman used ChatGPT<\/a> as a therapist before she killed herself (the software helped her write her suicide note). Studies show that using AI is probably leading us all towards something called cognitive surrender, which does not seem like the best use of your one wild and precious life.<\/p>\n

Artificial is a stylish and blunt satire that is unambiguous in its perspective: that Sam Altman is an amoral manipulator who might be dead inside. That goes some way towards explaining why Amazon MGM Studios pulled out<\/a> of distributing the film in June (Jeff Bezos\u2019s company has a $50bn investment in OpenAI). I found it to be more of an op-ed than a movie, with little insight into what makes Altman and the tech elite tick. Neither does it have much to say about the world \u2013 glossy magazines included \u2013 that has welcomed them with open arms.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In 2003, a young math prodigy named Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov, the heartbeat of the film) visits Prof Geoff Hinton (Mark Rylance<\/a>) in his office hoping for a job with the man known as the godfather of AI. \u201cHave you ever considered the link between knowledge and patience?\u201d Hinton serenely asks his young charge. You can almost feel Guadagnino is turning to the audience and giving us a big stage wink.<\/p>\n

Nine years later, Sutskever and Hinton\u2019s technology is starting to work \u201cmuch the way your mind does\u201d, with an ability to differentiate between cats and dogs, but Sutskever is growing increasingly impatient with what he sees as Hinton\u2019s conservative ambitions for the technology. It\u2019s at this point that Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz) introduces Sutskever to Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield<\/a>), who is fresh from selling his Loopt app, a kind of proto-Find My Friends, for $40m.<\/p>\n

These guys are total dweebs, peppering each other with puerile jokes while doing shots in upscale restaurants as servers grimace and pray for a tip. Everyone is starting to want what these guys are selling, and one prospective investor speculates that AI will soon be able to reverse climate change and cure cancer. When talking about the technology, Sutskever\u2019s eyes light up. \u201cAll pain, all loneliness will cease,\u201d he says, as knowingly over-the-top haunted house music plays. \u201cWe will be free.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s dramatic tension rests in the opposing poles of thought represented by Sutskever, a delusional optimist, and the self-motivated hubris of Altman. As we move into the recent past, cracks and fissures appear in their partnership as OpenAI\u2019s self-learning technology begins to first outsmart humans at video games, and then becomes a different beast entirely. Garfield is brilliantly slimy, nailing Altman\u2019s evolution from demon twink to a narcissistic grifter with a victim complex that climaxes with him being fired as the CEO of OpenAI<\/a> and then rehired five days later. \u201cThey\u2019re being very mean to me,\u201d he pouts in one scene after his board airs one of its many legitimate concerns over the ethics of his product.<\/p>\n

Yura Borisov, Luca Guadagnino, Andrew Garfield and Ike Barinholtz at the Artificial premiere at the New York film festival on Monday. Photograph: Michael Loccisano\/Getty Images for FLC<\/p>\n

Artificial is the most outwardly comedic Guadagnino film to date, with a script by the New Yorker essayist Simon Rich. The humor can be frustratingly broad, and it often feels like Barinholtz is impersonating Mike Myers doing Musk on Saturday Night Live than the Tesla founder himself (Rich is a former writer on SNL). Garfield seems to be playing Altman, who is an out gay man, as more effete than he actually is, which is strange as there are plenty of reasons to laugh at the tech oligarch that don\u2019t involve him being light in his loafers. At other times, the script is satisfyingly savage. After being questioned over safety concerns by his associate Mira Murati (Monica Barbaro), Altman snaps, \u201cI didn\u2019t invent teen suicide, Mira.\u201d<\/p>\n

I could have done without some Artificial\u2019s clangingly obvious visual metaphors, such as a random shot of a unhoused person wearing VR goggles, or the sudden plunge into a simulator-like sequence of a car accelerating over a foggy Golden Gate Bridge (we get it, we\u2019re taking a reckless leap into the unknown). The film comes with a score by Damon Albarn, and the Blur frontman contributes one original composition that an ASPCA advert would reject for being too on-the-nose with lyrics like, \u201cIn a corrupt world, we\u2019ll sing the saddest song.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s tech oligarch season at the movies, with films about Elon Musk<\/a>, Elizabeth Holmes and Mark Zuckerberg also due for release over the next few months as film-makers try to respond to the zeitgeist in real time. \u201cWe opened Pandora\u2019s box,\u201d Altman says in a standout monologue towards the end of the film. \u201cCountries will fall, industries will collapse, and we get to be the ones to usher people into this new world.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a grim prophecy that gets lost in Guadanigno\u2019s tonal jumble of a film, which has a certain self-satisfaction in telling us that dystopia is upon us. I couldn\u2019t help but crave a leaner, meaner version of this movie. Despite some genuinely chilling moments, Artificial shows the limits of holding up a mirror to the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the day that Luca Guadagnino\u2019s film about Sam Altman and OpenAI premiered, Vanity Fair released a cover…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":794085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-794084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=794084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/794085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=794084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=794084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=794084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}