The Hollywood standby of Oscar-hungry films depicting recent history has finally reached the AI era. A timely movie on this topic was inevitable, and the task has gladly fallen to Luca Guadagnino, one of contemporary cinema’s most sophisticated stylists. He does his level best visualising a functional, if unremarkable, script by comedy writer Simon Rich that radiates chilly disdain towards the tech oligarchs whose mysterious and powerful invention has jeopardised human life. The film, however, loses some of its potency by neglecting to explore how individuals and businesses are now fully reliant on AI, as wide adoption triggers potentially worse consequences: the emphasis being on invention, not on application, it comes across as only one side of a more complex story. After premiering at the New York Film Festival – with curiosity increased after its backer Amazon neglected to release the film, selling it on to Neon –, Artificial arrives as a BFI London Film Festival gala.

The fast-moving narrative whisks us through 20 years of technological and corporate growth, closely tracking OpenAI’s dubious milestones on its upward trajectory (including an association with Elon Musk, broadly played by Ike Barinholtz). Like The Social Network in 2010, the film should bring its key personnel, and their personality quirks and defects, further into the popular imagination. Foremost among them is the Israeli-Canadian scientist Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov), the resident genius and idealist, who collaborates with his PhD supervisor Geoffrey Hinton (a gentle Mark Rylance) to bring a prototype AI deep learning model to market, where it is acquired by Google. Frustrated at the Silicon Valley search giant’s eventual lack of support, he bands together with the deceptively trustworthy Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield, whose strange, hunched body language only makes him more intimidating), and they establish OpenAI, initially a nonprofit allowing its findings to be open source, helped by vital equity investment from Musk.

For the first half of this understandably lengthy film, Guadagnino is mostly intrigued to study his characters as particular behavioural types. Divorced from the usual fashion plates and aesthetes he favours, the story’s interest stems from the cast’s offbeat characterisations as studious shut-ins and introverts attempting pathbreaking, if abstract, feats – far beyond their efficiency-minded colleagues. The director conveys well how Sutskever’s pursuit of artificial general intelligence would make its final capacity unknown even to its creators, but after the hubbub of the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, scrutiny comes Altman’s way through his public-facing role as CEO, as the AI tool starts to have the well-reported, adverse effects we know on more vulnerable users. Rich and Guadagnino poignantly show how his shunning ethical responsibility is an attitude endemic to the AI sector’s dominance today.

Artificial doesn’t offer major revelations for those who’ve followed the news these last few years and its avoidance of working examples of the technology results in a disappointingly surface-level experience. Yet, the film creditably makes an obvious case for AI security and regulation which can’t be stated loudly and repeatedly enough.

Artificial is a co-production between the US, the UK and Italy, staged by JF Films, Heyday Films and Frenesy. Neon handles its global rights.