It charts the invention and corporate rise of AI, taking off from the cathartically topical question: If we don't control AI, who will? Moviegoers will be thrilled to hear that the 2026 fall movie season brings with it a fantastic sequel to “The Social Network.” But I’m not talking about “The Social Reckoning” — Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to “The Social Network” (out this Friday), which continues the saga of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg by hanging the yoke of blame on him for everything that’s wrong with social media. No the real sequel to “The Social Network” is “Artificial,” Luca Guadagnino’s sprawling, enthralling, brain-spinning drama about the creation of artificial intelligence. (It had its world premiere tonight at the New York Film Festival.) “Artificial” is a brilliant but playful docudrama, meticulously true to history, that focuses on the founders of OpenAI, notably its CEO Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield).
But the tale it tells is much larger than that. That turns out to be a story unlike any other, because the very nature of artificial intelligence — technology that’s as intelligent and searching as the human mind, or maybe smarter — is that even the people who invented it don’t quite know what it is or what it will do. They have an idea of its potential, but they can’t predict it — they can only let it loose and see what it’s capable of, which will probably be more than anyone bargained for.
And by then, it will be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. Like “The Social Network,” the film shows us a digital “aha” moment that takes on an unexpected life of its own, though in this case two things about the technology are clear from the start: It will change the way we live, and it’s therefore worth a zillion trillion dollars. So this is a dawn-of-a-new-world story, as well as a backstabbing corporate business story, and a horror movie too, in which AI emerges from the lab as a sinister serpent, and the dramatic question is: Who’s going to control it, and how?
Most of all, “Artificial” is a human story that shows us what it looks like when people are suddenly in charge of a force they devised that may be more powerful than they are. It’s been a long time since I saw a film that attained this next-level feeling of topical charge. A lot of people will go into “Artificial,” as I did, not knowing all that much about AI and feeling as if it’s a frosty and abstract frontier.
Yet as you watch the film, AI comes alive as a subject. It becomes real — you touch what it is, what it means, what the stakes are. The result is a movie that’s at once inspiring and deeply chilling, and when it’s over you’re in a different place.
And that is what a ripped-from-the-headlines movie should do. It shouldn’t merely be a dramatization of what we already know but, rather, a future-shock referendum on our lives and our values and maybe our souls. The screenplay, by Simon Rich, is pitched at a high-wire level of tech-geek patter, to the point that you may not follow every line.
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