Luca Guadagnino has made a comedy about the people building artificial intelligence, and the first argument about it is whether a comedy is the right tool. Artificial screens as a Gala at the BFI London Film Festival on 11 October, six days after its world premiere at the New York Film Festival. It has not yet been shown in Britain, so what follows is a reading of the New York reviews and of what they suggest London should look for.
The funniest Guadagnino, by design
The screenplay is by Simon Rich, a New Yorker essayist and a former writer for Saturday Night Live. The Guardian’s Owen Myers calls the result ‘the most outwardly comedic Guadagnino film to date’. Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman, Yura Borisov plays Ilya Sutskever, and Ike Barinholtz turns up as Elon Musk. According to Myers, the early scenes show the founders as ‘total dweebs’, trading jokes over shots in expensive restaurants while investors talk about curing cancer and reversing climate change.
The lines the Guardian quotes give a sense of the register. Garfield’s Altman, challenged by his board, pouts: ‘They’re being very mean to me.’ Pressed on safety by Mira Murati, played by Monica Barbaro, he snaps: ‘I didn’t invent teen suicide, Mira.’ The first is sketch comedy. The second is something colder, and it belongs to the side of the script that Myers calls ‘satisfyingly savage’.
Where the jokes stop working
The same review is clear about the cost. The humour, Myers writes, ‘can be frustratingly broad’, and Barinholtz’s Musk reminds him more of a television impression than of the man. Other critics make a related complaint from a different direction. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich finds the script blunt and its characters closer to archetypes than to people. TheWrap finds the film preachy in places. Screen International’s Tim Grierson argues that it registers the anxiety around AI without really examining those who hold the power.
Put together, the objections describe one risk. Satire needs a target the audience recognises, but it also needs to tell us something about the target that we did not already believe. Myers’s verdict is that Artificial manages the first and not the second: ‘more of an op-ed than a movie’.
The case for laughing anyway
The favourable reviews do not deny the bluntness. They argue that it is the point. TheWrap, for all its reservations, credits the film with stating a humanist position plainly at a moment when technology executives prefer vague language. In Variety the film has been called Guadagnino’s best in a decade. The reviews also describe a shift late on, from dry humour to something close to horror. Myers singles out a monologue near the end in which Altman says: ‘We opened Pandora’s box.’
That turn may be the real test. A comedy that ends in dread has to earn both halves. If the laughter in the first hour makes the last act feel heavier, the broadness will look like strategy. If it does not, the film will look like two different pictures joined in the middle, which is roughly what Myers means when he calls it a ‘tonal jumble’.
What to listen for on 11 October
Three things are worth listening for at the Gala: whether the room laughs with the film or at it, whether Borisov’s Sutskever, whom Myers calls ‘the heartbeat of the film’, gives the jokes something to push against, and whether the ending leaves an argument or only a mood.
Artificial screens at the BFI London Film Festival on 11 October. The festival runs from 7 to 18 October 2026. According to the Guardian, the film opens in UK cinemas on 27 January.
Image: Luca Guadagnino, 2024. Photo: Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
