Andrew Garfield is Sam Altman now, and the first footage is out to prove it.

Neon dropped the teaser trailer for Artificial on Monday, confirming what trade circles had been chewing on for months: Luca Guadagnino's OpenAI drama will hit theatres on Christmas Day. The film premieres first at the New York Film Festival on October 5, then goes wide on December 25.

The story sits inside five very strange days in November 2023, when Altman was fired as OpenAI's chief executive and then brought back within a week. Garfield plays Altman with a flat, unsettling calm. In the trailer he narrates over shots of Altman walking into work: "We're going to call it ChatGPT. We open Pandora's box together. The future is inevitable. Countries will fall. Industries are going to collapse. And we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world. I'm so excited to see it."

That's the tone the whole thing seems to be chasing. Not hero worship. Something closer to dread.

Garfield told The Hollywood Reporter he built the performance from the script, court transcripts and interviews, not from any personal access to his subject. "I don't know this person, to be clear," he said. "I don't know Sam Altman. I've never met him." He added that anyone who takes on that scale of responsibility for a technology bound to reshape the world needs, in his words, a certain ability to dissociate.

The cast around him is stacked. Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk, Monica Barbaro is former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Anora's Yura Borisov plays ex-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and Mark Rylance shows up as Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Hoffman, Chris O'Dowd, Cooper Koch and Billie Lourd fill out the ensemble.

Here's the part that makes this whole release feel improbable. Amazon MGM developed and financed Artificial, then quietly dropped it earlier this year, right around the time it signed a $50 billion partnership and investment deal with OpenAI itself. The studio's official line was that the film would "be better served if it were released by a different studio," which is corporate speak for exactly what everyone assumed. Netflix, A24 and Focus Features all passed before Neon picked it up in June.

Guadagnino directs from a script by Simon Rich, the former SNL writer, with Rich also producing alongside David Heyman, Jeffrey Clifford and Jennifer Fox.

Given the subject and the mess that got it here, Artificial has the kind of real-world friction that awards voters tend to notice. Whether that translates to actual Oscar traction is a different question, one that starts getting answered the moment it screens at Lincoln Center in October.