‘Artificial’ review: Andrew Garfield enters his villain era

When much of the world looks at Andrew Garfield, they see a hero. Not only has the charismatic English actor played Spider-Man, but he’s also been the noble protagonist of The Uprising, Under the Banner of Heaven, Silence, and tick, tick…Boom! Yet when Italian film director Luca Guadagnino looks at Garfield, he sees that the actor’s potential as a villain lies in his charms.  

Last year, with After the Hunt, Guadagnino employed Garfield’s sex appeal to set up a flirty academic who is then accused of sexual assault. The audience’s presumed appreciation for Garfield scratches us in this role, as we’re asked to consider if such a beguiling man could be a rapist. Now, with Artificial, Guadagnino weaponizes Garfield’s charms more extensively. Together, they portray OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman as a cult leader, and by extension the artificial intelligence industry as a cult desperate for all of us to, if not join, then at least submit. 

Artificial centers on the rise of OpenAI, but not Sam Altman.  

The controversial AI exec is a sly antagonist in Artificial. The film itself follows Ilya Sutskever (Anora‘s Yura Borisov), a Soviet-born computer scientist who was making waves with his research in Canada when Altman came knocking. 

In Ilya, Artificial presents an idealist who is drawn in by Sam’s argument that OpenAI is not a company built to prioritize profits over the well-being of mankind. Together, they dream of changing the world. But Ilya, who never lies, is confounded by the double-talk Sam performs, making false promises and schemes as easily as breathing. Artificial is the story of Ilya’s disillusionment, as he battles Sam for the future of AI — and mankind. 

Elon Musk is a clown in Artificial.

Guadagnino sets up the main figures of his film as a study in contrasts. Where Ilya is unflaggingly honest, generally stoic, and endlessly eager, Sam is deceptive, breezy, and relentlessly strategizing. Then there’s Elon Musk. 

Played here by comedian Ike Barinholtz, Musk is portrayed as an egomaniac who bosses around his underlings, turns up hours late for a dinner he’s hosting, and eats McDonald’s on a private jet while grumbling about his business rivals. Which is all to say, screenwriter Simon Rich delves as shallowly into a critique of Musk as your average Saturday Night Live sketch. 

Musk’s main role in Artificial is to establish the baseline for tech bro behavior, post-The Social Network. In that David Fincher hit, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was memorialized as a smug Harvard student who flexed his power by wearing dorm wear as business casual. Here, Musk’s macho posturing and brashness are positioned as the new normal. In real life, this enhanced machismo in the tech space led to threats of a real fight between Zuckerberg and Musk. Sadly, that was another false promise from Musk, like the time he said he’d end world hunger. 

Andrew Garfield is a shrewd villain in Artificial. 

Artificial lacks the teeth to dig into any of this toxic masculinity, instead showing how Altman may have set himself apart by seemingly rejecting it. In the movie, where Elon swaggers and snarls, Sam swans about in skinny jeans, impishly sits on tables cross-legged, and speaks in a gentle, cajoling voice, even when he’s being dastardly and manipulative. He’s slight and non-threatening with a jaunty bounce in his step, even as he trots down to his hidden bunker, meticulously stocked with doomsday supplies, including a John Wick-level firearms cache.

Through this depiction of Altman, Guadagnino begs us to look past the enchanting facade. Resist Garfield’s smile. Don’t trust his entreating tone, reminiscent in some regard to Jack O’Connell’s alluring vampire Remmick in Sinners, as he pled with song and smile to be let into Smoke and Stacks’ juke joint.

In this way, Artificial leans away from its historical-drama expectations and toward a horror movie vibe, despite its atypical setting. The gorgeous streets of San Francisco are picturesque, as are the hiking trails that look adoringly down on the Golden Gate Bridge, or the lush green vineyards of Napa Valley, where OpenAI employees go on retreats. But when Sam goes home, there are dark caverns that lead to his bunker. When his position is threatened, Artificial shows him in a shadowy, posh penthouse, overlooking an urbanscape, lit with neon like his secret armory. 

These visual cues add depth that Rich’s screenplay lacks, as much of the dialogue turns into computer scientists and capitalists talking in circles about the potential pros and cons of AI. Guadagnino’s supporting cast, which also boasts Monica Barbaro, Mark Rylance, Cooper Hoffman, and Jason Schwartzman, brings verve to these sections. But even collectively, they can’t save Artificial from feeling like a finger-wagging parable that doesn’t seem to fully understand the tech it’s critiquing. 

Maybe that doesn’t matter, though.

Perhaps it’s enough that Garfield makes Altman a movie monster, as Robert Pattinson does with Primetime. Rejecting the bland salesman pose that Altman most often presents to the public, Garfield makes our skin crawl with Sam’s melodic lies. His smile becomes a sickening smirk. In framing OpenAI’s story as a collective with good intentions being steadily corrupted by a self-appointed savior, Artificial aims to urge its audience to question the truth rather than giving in to Altman and the temptations of AI.

Artificial was reviewed out of the New York Film Festival, and will open in limited release on Dec. 25.