Artificial film review and star rating: ★★★★★
It isn’t typically a film’s duty to push a political agenda, but with Artificial, the biopic of OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, there is a clear call to action. It is inevitable that people will ask: ‘What can this film do?’
Luca Guadagnino’s eleventh film is a particularly disturbing portrait of AI, following the tech entrepreneur Sam Altman, who launched AI chatbot Chat GPT in 2022, instigating an arms race involving Grok, Gemini, and Claude. Some leading scientists have claimed that the power and potential of these programmes means they could destroy humanity by the end of the 2020s.
A decade ago that would have been the stuff of science fiction movies, but in autumn 2026, Artificial feels terrifyingly prescient.
Artificial: film conveys how Sam Altman is loved in Messianic way
It is also very good. Most unnerving is Andrew Garfield’s psychopathically cocksure impression of Altman. The Spider-Man actor nails the businessman’s frenetic energy; he’s forever gyrating his hips, casting strange Cheshire cat grins, and glancing his eyes toward the sky in a way that you can never quite interpret. Is he performatively cocksure, or is that humanity? Garfield conveys how Atlman is impossible to decipher.
Luca Guadagnino conveys his emotional distance through dreamlike sequences involving Altman and Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientific officer and co-founder, who pioneered the technology but later warned of its unethical effects. In one trippy scene, the duo depart on a hike through the San Francisco hills, the camera blurring out of focus during Altman’s ramblings.
Altman is presented as emotionally complex, unable to properly express his love for his partner Oliver but adored in a messianic way by OpenAI staffers, who at one point chant “feel the AI” as they carry him up a flight of stairs.
Campy Elon Musk
Ike Barinholtz’s campy Elon Musk will surely infuriate the Grok founder, who worked with Altman during the early days of Chat GPT. His farcical impression – all peace signs and pouty faces – is just about close enough to the real man to work, while bringing some light relief. Writer Simon Rich, who based much of Artificial on conversations with a friend who works at OpenAI, writes clearly in the voices of these giants, although the physical impressions are so effective that the words play second fiddle.
Yura Borisov is magnetic as eastern European science whizz Ilya, who is at emotional boiling point as he argues endlessly with Altman that OpenAI must maintain its not-for-profit status. OpenAI insists on sprinting forward despite the scientist’s warnings the technology could have devastating effects. Their friendship might be platonic, but Atlman and Sutskever’s love affair is no less compelling than the heartbreak at the centre of Call Me By Your Name, the director’s most famous work.
Rylance is magnificent
Mark Rylance is quietly magnificent as Ilya’s moral compass, the principled academic Geoffrey Hinton. You hang on the every word of this grounded professor, particularly as employees learn that AI gaining sentience doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be better than humans, rather it will be flawed like us.
“Rogue” AI agents from OpenAI are already threatening online security with the latest example being a flood of requests from their AI robots causing Wikipedia to temporarily go down. At the same time, the UK’s AI minister is warning of an “inevitable” AI attack on the country. In what will surely be the talking point film of 2027 – its UK cinematic release is end of January – Artificial is the closest look we’ve had at the charismatic, terrifying men at the heart of the AI revolution.
Artificial played at the London Film Festival. The film is released in UK cinemas on 22 January