Andrew Garfield becomes Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, a film that premiered at the New York Film Festival on Monday and has already been called ‘downright horrifying’ by critics. The movie, which traces Altman’s tumultuous 2023 ousting and reinstatement as OpenAI’s CEO, is being hailed as Guadagnino’s best work in ten years — a feverish, visceral corporate drama where the real monster isn’t the AI, but the boardroom. 

Garfield, who last worked with Guadagnino on After the Hunt (2025), disappears into the role with unnerving precision. Critics say he captures Altman’s disarming charm and chilling ambition in equal measure. Yura Borisov, as Ilya Sutskever, is described as the emotional core, a brilliant mind grappling with the consequences of what he helped create. Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk, Monica Barbaro is Mira Murati, Mark Rylance portrays Geoffrey Hinton, and Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Hoffman, Chris O’Dowd, Cooper Koch, and Billie Lourd round out the cast. Simon Rich wrote the script. 

The film’s journey to release was anything but smooth. Amazon MGM Studios walked away after signing a $50 billion partnership with OpenAI. Neon stepped in in June to complete the $40 million project. Now, Neon is launching an awards campaign: Garfield and Rylance are being pushed for supporting actor. Borisov for lead. Barbaro for supporting actress. 

Altman himself hasn’t seen the film. He never met Garfield, but he did notice something uncanny. In a recent Vanity Fair interview, he said he once saw a man walking down the street near his home, dressed like him, carrying the same backpack. “I felt like I was in some weird glitch of the simulation,” he said. 

Variety reported that Next Best Picture editor-in-chief Matt Neglia called the film ‘as entertaining as it is terrifying,’ describing it as a brilliantly written human story about power, control, ambition, and greed that might be the most urgently relevant film of our time. He praised Garfield’s performance as ‘one of his most unsettling and transformative.’ Jairo Jiménez wrote that Guadagnino ‘guts Silicon Valley with his obsessive pulse & a powerful farce in which Andrew Garfield completely shines,’ adding that the film proves ‘what is truly artificial was never in the machines, but in the boardroom.’ Eric Kohn called it a ‘pitch-perfect dark comedy,’ noting Garfield walks a fine line between movie monster, buffoonish mogul, and evil genius. Clayton Davis echoed the sentiment, calling it Guadagnino’s best film in a decade and praising the performances of Garfield and Borisov. 

Artificial opens in theaters on Christmas Day. The question now isn’t whether it’ll be talked about. It already is. It’s whether anyone will still want to look back on it when the future it warns about arrives.