Vague Visages’ Artificial review contains minor spoilers. Luca Guadagnino’s 2026 movie features Andrew Garfield, Billie Lourd and Monica Barbaro. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Premiering just after Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning (2026) underperformed with critics and audiences, Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial can’t help but feel like a worthier sequel to David Fincher’s 2010 masterpiece of tech pessimism and capitalist greed, The Social Network. Initially set in 2003, when teenage computer scientist Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov) first met his mentor Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance), the Simon Rich-scripted movie charts the decades-long curdling of the former character’s optimistic dream of creating a large language neural network that would positively benefit humanity.  

Ilya believes he’s creating an assistant to educators and healthcare professionals with the power to help future generations. By the early 2020s, Silicon Valley capital and corporate interference has made him the last naive true believer of technology that his company’s CEO Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield) is only interested in the financial benefits of. 

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The OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT was released to the public before any responsible guardrails were put in place as part of a Silicon Valley arms race to be the first to get an AI chatbot up and running. Artificial doesn’t mute its criticisms, painting a picture of a society on the brink of a social apocalypse because the toothpaste is now out of the tube, the inability to control this technology making a large-scale disaster a case not of if, but when. The biggest achievement of Rich’s script, and Guadagnino’s increased lean into gothic melodrama style as the story progresses, might be the way it manages to persuade viewers of how rapidly things will get worse.

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Artificial premiered at the same London Film Festival where Danny Boyle’s Ink (2026) embarrassingly attempted to resurrect Margaret Thatcher through lackluster AI visuals; if that’s the maximum quality this technology is capable of, then I feel like the doomsday alarmism is at a scale that doesn’t quite match with reality. However, Artificial is utterly convincing in its argument that this could have a far more destabilizing effect on the world than you’d expect from seeing the slop these tools regularly pump out. The final stretch of the movie — covering Altman’s firing and swift rehiring as CEO — highlights corporate negligence at such a scale that seeing it mapped out feels like looking into the abyss.

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This technology is already destructive for the environment and the workforce in several industries, but Rich’s screenplay reinforces that the worst part is that the pandora’s box was opened by a man with unchecked capitalist aspirations to keep his company growing beyond those early warning signs. What good do Ilya’s noble intentions have if his own CEO doesn’t want to put precautions in place to ensure people don’t develop parasocial relationships, or if the chatbot doesn’t reinforce users’ mental health conditions?

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Garfield’s performance as Altman is one of his finest, playing the tech mogul as a sociopath always climbing the social ladder who hides his cold, capitalist aspirations behind a bubbly queer persona. Just look at how he overly accentuates a camp accent in boardroom or public-facing scenarios, positioning himself as a friendly, approachable figure to hide the damage he’s doing (and the expert concerns he’s willfully ignoring) in plain sight. It contrasts well with Borisov’s lead turn as the socially awkward but endearing nerd who is unable to lie. His ultimate tragedy is not realizing he’s found himself in an industry where nobody is as sincere nor as selfless.

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Where Artificial falls short of The Social Network is its structure, with each successive scene jumping forward months or years to detail another crucial moment in the story of OpenAI’s creation. Guadagnino’s film lacks a similar structural conceit to Fincher’s movie, which charts the story of Facebook’s creation organically via testimonies at dual deposition hearings; a punchier approach that made it easy to overlook the conventional, beat-by-beat narrative formula it shares with countless other biopics. Nor is Artificial’s dialogue quite as delicious or quotable as that of Sorkin at the peak of his powers, with some moments of dry humor rubbing awkwardly against the broadest biopic cliches.

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Despite Ike Barinholtz’s overly mannered portrayal of Elon Musk, Artificial never stops distracting whenever it enters the frame of a more grounded, more sobering procedural story. Although, with these script criticisms in mind, I still expect a scene-stealing monologue from Jason Schwartzman’s Zeke, an AI pessimist, about his bleak vision of the future to do gangbusters social media numbers when clipped out of context. It’s the one moment Rich aspires towards Sorkin and pulls the tone off better than the man himself has in over a decade. That I was immediately thinking about how it will soon appear on social timelines divorced from the movie itself is probably not the best indicator for whether audiences will connect with the wider, dryer, fact-driven account.

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Ultimately, Artificial only falls short when it’s placed in the shadow of the inescapable comparison to The Social Network that will always be unflattering. Guadagnino couldn’t be accused of trying to replicate Fincher’s playbook, and the movie’s slow descent into existential horror elevates it beyond safe-but-engaging biopic fare. Guadagnino’s procedural approach certainly makes Artificial less immediately impactful, but as an origin story for such potentially destructive technology, laying all the facts out on the table leads to depressingly sobering results.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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