Artificial Review: The Real Sequel to The Social Network Is…

Artificial Review: The Real Sequel to The Social Network Is Here

Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial isn’t a sequel to The Social Network — it’s a reckoning. Andrew Garfield and Yura Borisov play the architects of AI, but the real question is: Who controls the mind they’ve created?

By Reel to Reel6 Oct 20261 min read

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The real sequel to The Social Network isn’t Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning — it’s Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s new docudrama that premiered tonight at the New York Film Festival. And it’s not just a movie about tech. It’s a fever dream of what happens when genius outpaces control. Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO whose vision for AI is both godlike and terrifyingly human.

But the film’s true star is Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, a 17-year-old Russian prodigy who walks into a Toronto classroom in 2003 and rewrites the future with a chalkboard equation. He’s not just brilliant, he’s haunted by what he’s unleashing. Guadagnino doesn’t dramatize AI like a sci-fi thriller. He treats it like a confession.

The film traces the rise of artificial intelligence from its earliest whispers. Hinton’s early models, the first neural networks, to the moment Google bids $20 million for a prototype in five seconds. That’s when the money starts to matter. That’s when the world changes.

It’s a brain-spinning ride. Simon Rich’s screenplay crackles with the kind of technical jargon that sounds like poetry to those who speak it. You won’t catch every line. That’s the point.

This is how geniuses think. Fast, furious, and utterly convinced they’re building something sacred. But the film never lets you forget the stakes. When Ilya warns that AI might become smarter than us, it’s not a metaphor.

It’s a prophecy. And by the time the credits roll, you’re not sure if you’ve seen a triumph or a warning. This isn’t just a movie about code. It’s about power.

About who gets to decide what comes next. And whether we’ll still be around to care.   Artificial hits theaters Friday. No one’s saying if it’ll win an Oscar. But it already feels like the most urgent film of the year.