The End of The World as we Know it: Guadagnino Creates a Thrilling Portrait of the Losers who Will Kill us All
It’s all over the news, foisted upon your social media and even creeping into our mediums of creativity. If the sudden rise and development of AI feels overwhelmingly fast and uncontrolled, that’s because it is. And as Luca Guadagnino’s riotous if overegged 11th feature Artificial explains, it’s only going to get worse from here.
A biographical and remarkably relevant film which chronicles the meteoric rise of both artificial intelligence and Sam Altman’s (Andrew Garfield) progressively dangerous management of company OpenAI. We start in 2003 with a 17 year old (with a pinch of salt) math genius Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov) crashing into the office of professor Geoffery Hinton (Mark Rylance), the man closest to cracking a new, exciting technology known as AI. After collaboration, a lot of work and a lot of success, nine years later Illya is frustrated with the lack of progress, believing he could accelerate this technology that “teaches itself” and use it for good. He soon bumps into Sam Altman who befriends and shares his vision for acceleration into the future of both AI and the staggering amount of money it could generate. With help and support from an absurd and pantomime Elon Musk (Ike Barenholtz) and an army of nerdy, loser tech bros, OpenAI grows and extrapolates into the dangerous and volatile potential human overlord we recognise today.
For a film tackling such a loaded and terrifying subject SNL alum screenwriter Sam Rich adds plenty of humour to an otherwise dark tale. These men are a cabal of the biggest idiots you’ve ever met. Garfield mostly nails Altman’s slimy, insincere and patronizing persona, he walks with a confident yet annoying bounce and dresses in terrible hiking gear and tight long sleeve shirts absolutely oozing ick. This is in opposition to the equally badly dressed but way more morally correct Ilya who recognizes the safety concerns inevitable with a roll out and expansion this quick and this unvetted. This is also shared by Albanian-American Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati (Monica Barbaro) who constantly and unsuccessfully warns Sam. While more garish, comic relief comes from Barenholtz’s stupid yet undeniably funny portrayal of Musk and Cooper Hoffman’s shouty, screamy co-founder Greg Brockman. This is essentially a clown show and it’s all funny but also slightly mismanaged when we’re dealing with the end of times.
The cinematography from Malik Hassan Sayeed veers all over the place as Guadagnino typically mixes it up with lots of engaging and inventive shots. When the story focuses on the dramatic tension and essential breakup of Sam and Illya (with notes of Hitchcock’s Vertigo embedded in the longer dramatic sequence), he goes all Barry Jenkins forcing us to look straight into the eyes of these men so devoid of understanding for normal people just like me and you. The film is often a thoroughly engaging thrill-ride and it’s fun to fly too close to the sun, at least for a while. There is genuine understanding and fear around just how catastrophic this is all going to be and despite Altman’s silliness he can be the cutting and morose villain that let this rage on. The film plays as a less focused The Social Network for the modern age with fewer soliloquies yet more juice, for better and for worse.
As the eventual problems come to a head in Artificial there’s a feeling of prescience and immediacy that has been undoubtedly captured. Just last week at the time of writing Sam Altman said we would have to “accept bad things in return for the benefits of AI”. And while Guadagnino’s Artificial isn’t I Am Love (2009) perfection, it may well serve as an early marker that signposted the end of the world and they did nothing to stop it.
Reviewed on October 13th at the 2026 London BFI Film Festival (70th edition) Galas programme. 140 Minutes.
★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
