Neon has released the first trailer for “Artificial,” and the pitch is exactly as blunt as it sounds: Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman, Luca Guadagnino directs, and the whole thing opens in select theaters on Christmas Day. The film is built around the five days in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired its chief executive and then, under enormous pressure, put him back. It is a corporate governance story. Guadagnino has made it look like a party you were not cool enough to be invited to.
That is the first surprise of the trailer. There is almost no computing in it. What there is instead is a hypercar photographed from above on cracked tarmac, a private jet on an empty apron, the Golden Gate Bridge in flat grey morning light, a long dinner table crowded with young men shouting over each other, and a lake somewhere with two dozen people in swim shorts piling onto an inflatable. It is shot like a film about money and appetite rather than a film about software, which is a choice, and on the evidence of ninety seconds it is the right one.
Music and original songs by Damon Albarn.”
That card, which arrives near the end, is the detail nobody was reporting and it changes the shape of the thing. Damon Albarn writing music and original songs for a film about OpenAI is not a neutral hiring decision. Guadagnino has form here, having built “Challengers” on a Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score that treated a tennis match as a rave, and handing this material to the man behind Blur and Gorillaz suggests the same intent: score the boardroom like a nightclub and let the tempo make the argument. The other card is almost as telling. “Artificial” is written by Simon Rich, a comedy writer, not a tech journalist.
The cast list reads like a directory of people you already have opinions about. Garfield is Altman. Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk. Monica Barbaro is former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, Yura Borisov of “Anora” plays former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and Mark Rylance plays Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate frequently described as a godfather of the field. Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Hoffman, Chris O’Dowd, Cooper Koch and Billie Lourd fill out the rest. Casting Barinholtz as Musk is the trailer’s biggest single tell about tone, and it is not a subtle one.
The best shot in the trailer is the least dramatic one. Somebody stands in a warehouse space holding up a black T-shirt with the OpenAI logo on it while a room of employees watches, and the moment lands somewhere between a rally and a merchandise drop. Around it there is a crowd celebrating behind a barrier, a group of men on a suburban street doing nothing in particular, and a woman in a party crowd whose face is the only one in the trailer not enjoying itself. Guadagnino keeps finding the person at the edge of the frame who has understood something the others have not.
It is a remarkably compressed piece of work. Twenty-one shots in seventy-seven seconds, no voiceover, and no dialogue scene allowed to run long enough for you to catch a full exchange. The last fifteen seconds are given over entirely to title cards, which arrive in a deliberate order: the film, then the writer, then the composer, then the date. Putting a composer credit in a teaser at all is unusual. Putting it directly before the release date, as the final piece of information you are given about the film, is a distributor telling you the music is part of the sell.
What is missing is as pointed as what is there. Nobody says the word “artificial” out loud. There is no shot of a screen displaying anything, no chatbot interface, no server room, no scene of a person typing. For a film about the company that put a language model in front of the general public, the trailer is conspicuously uninterested in the product. It wants the boardroom, the lake house and the private jet, which suggests the story being told is about a scramble for control rather than about the technology anybody was scrambling to control.
Whether that adds up to a film is the open question, and the honest answer is that a trailer for a story like this can hide almost anything. The events themselves are genuinely dramatic but they are also, structurally, a series of meetings. A board removes a chief executive on a Friday. Employees threaten to walk. Investors apply pressure. By the following Wednesday he is back. There is no chase in that, no weapon, nothing that a camera naturally wants. Every choice visible here — the cars, the parties, the score, the comedy writer — looks like an attempt to solve exactly that problem.
The release strategy carries its own message. “In select theaters Christmas Day” is not a wide opening, it is an awards posture, and Neon has run that play before to considerable effect. A limited Christmas release is a distributor telling voters where to look.
The risk is obvious and worth stating plainly. Films about very recent technology history tend to age at the speed of the technology, and this one is arriving while its subjects are still in their jobs and still making news. “The Social Network” had eight years of distance and a screenwriter willing to invent. “Artificial” has roughly three years and a set of people who will all watch it. That is either the most interesting constraint a film like this can have, or the thing that makes it careful in the places it needs to be cruel.
What the trailer promises, though, is not caution. It is a Guadagnino film about ambition, appetite and a room full of people convinced they are saving the world, scored by Damon Albarn and opening on the most sentimental day in the calendar. “Artificial” is in select theaters Christmas Day.
What Do You Think? Is three years enough distance to make a film about OpenAI, or does “Artificial” arrive too early to say anything its subjects cannot still argue with? Does casting Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk signal satire, and is satire the right register for this story? And is a limited Christmas Day opening confidence from Neon, or a hedge?
See you on the next binge!
