Luca Guadagnino delivers his best film since "Call Me by Your Name," and Neon's bet on its star in the supporting actor race looks genius throughout every scene. Andrew Garfield found the Norman Bates of Silicon Valley, and he could win an Oscar for it. The Academy gave “Psycho” (1960) four nominations at the 33rd Oscars, and none of them were for the motel clerk with the stuffed birds.
Alfred Hitchcock landed his fifth and final best director nod. Janet Leigh, whose Marion Crane doesn’t make it out of the first half the movie, was nominated for supporting actress. Anthony Perkins, who turned Norman Bates into the most likable monster the movies have ever produced, didn’t get a nom for what many consider one of the greatest performances in film history (The American Film Institute ranked Norman the No. 2 villain in film history, behind only Hannibal Lecter).
And now, 66 years later, you can see the ghost of Perkins’ work in the horror classic, watching Andrew Garfield pull off the same trick as OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s dark dramedy “Artificial,” which premiered at the New York Film Festival and received a rapturous reception. Hopefully this time, voters offer Garfield a better outcome than they did for Perkins. Guadagnino and screenwriter Simon Rich make a persuasive, often very funny case that those five days were humanity’s last real chance to pump the brakes on artificial intelligence and that the chance got traded away for money and the bruised egos of a few tech bros who have never once been told no.
It also feels like a warning shot for us all as we descend into more AI, and words like “super intelligence” become mainstream in our modern societies. But doomsday feelings aside, we’ve got a bona fide Oscar on our hands. It’s Guadagnino’s best film since “Call Me by Your Name,” and Garfield, along with his leading co-star Yura Borisov, is delivering top-tier acting work across the board.
To be clear, nobody is accusing Altman of keeping his mother in the fruit cellar (at least not today). The comparison is about the craft and how Garfield approaches the character. Perkins understood that Norman only works if the audience likes him: He stammers, fusses over sandwiches and chews candy corn while chatting with a private detective.
Garfield builds his Altman the same way. Sitting almost constantly crisscross-applesauce, his voice stays soft, as his eyes get wide and he listens intently, as if he’s completely fixated on the human being in front of him. Until, suddenly, the life drains from his eyes, sometimes for barely a second, and returning before anyone else in the scene notices.
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