“See? It’s easy.”

It’s easy to dismiss a movie as having nothing new to add to the conversation, especially when it comes to something within the zeitgeist. Artificial intelligence is a topic that is, unfortunately, inescapable. Anyone with at least half a brain knows of its destructive and soulless capabilities by now, and of the senseless morons who pioneered it and continue to champion it. So a movie about such evil could risk being pointless, but this film never resembles such futility. 

In a welcome way, Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial is a very silly film. It opens at Toronto University in 2006 as Ilya Sutskever, played by the Anora breakout star Yura Borisov, and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, played by Mark Rylance, make a breakthrough that will forever alter the course of humanity. This is without a doubt Luca’s most sprawling film; it moves from scene to scene, and year to year as quickly as the rise in AI has happened in front of our eyes. We are also introduced to Andrew Garfield’s pathetic Sam Altman and Ike Barinholtz’s preposterous Elon Musk; none of these is pejorative labels- the opposite, in fact- but Luca really takes advantage of our characters’ ridiculous self-seriousness, making us question whether we should even be laughing at the outright evil stupidity of this ensemble. Playing this film as something solemn would have been a grave misfire. It works to the extent it does because it channels the silliness of these chuds into ominous disbelief. The guy who initiated this all can’t lie, but the intelligence they created can. 

Read more of our LFF 2026 coverage →

Guadagnino seems aware of the possible criticisms that this film could have nothing new to say, which is why, instead of simply picking the straightforward route of AI is the worst thing to happen in our lifetime and these Silicon Valley morons don’t know what they are doing, he introduces contradictions and cognitive dissonance into some of their characters. Most of them are aware of the unknown flood they have unleashed, which is where Guadagnino and screenwriter Simon Rich tamper with doubt in some of their minds. It plays on the juxtaposition between wanting to restrict the capabilities of AI to human control, but, cynically, being fully aware that the trajectory of AI is for it to feed on us and become our overlords. Nobody has the power to stop it, but they’re gonna let it happen anyway. 

“You’ve seen 2001, right?”

The film touches on a significant incident at one point: on November 17th 2023, Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board of directors. On November 22nd 2023, just mere days later, Altman was rehired into the same position as CEO. It’s comically inconceivable that this film went through a similar process, as in June 2026, Amazon MGM suddenly dropped the film and shipped it to new buyers; it was ultimately picked up by Neon. Once you’ve seen it, it is obvious why the film was dropped and taken on by someone else; that in itself speaks to the film’s potency and daming apocalyptic prophecy of its endless net of illogicality. Guadagnino turns the picturesque scenes of San Francisco valleys and happy families into destined nightmares of asininity. Its backdrops are frequently uncanny, placing its ensemble in weirdly alien positions in tone with its lighting, like AI possessing the form. As the film exhibits, they will stop at nothing just to get a tweet off.

★★★★

Playing at the BFI London Film Festival on 11th, 15th, and 16th October / Andrew Garfield, Yura Borisov, Cooper Hoffman, Monica Barbaro / Dir: Luca Guadagnino / Neon / 15

About the Author

Oscar Trinick

Editor

Oscar Trinick is a multi-platform freelance film journalist, podcast co-host, and occasional sports writer. He has bylines on Movie Marker, Soundsphere, Film News Blitz, The Rolling Tape and Sport Just Sport. He has an honours degree in Journalism with an NCTJ accreditation. He has also had past internships with Trill Mag and SIP Media Solutions.

View All Posts