Director: Luca Guadagnino 
Writer: Simon Rich
Stars: Andrew Garfield, Yura Borisov, Mark Rylance, Monica Barbaro, Ike Barinholtz
Producers: Jeffrey Clifford, Jennifer Fox, Luca Guadagnino, David Heyman, Simon Rich
Score: Damon Albarn
Duration: 140 min
Certification: PG-13 (US)
Year: UK release: 22 January 2027
Another year, another BFI London Film Festival special review. A sold-out Royal Festival Hall, watching a film about the machine half the room had probably asked for a lunch recommendation that afternoon. Luca Guadagnino (Challengers, Queer) and SNL alumnus Simon Rich turn the birth of OpenAI, the premature launch of ChatGPT and the boardroom coup that briefly ousted Sam Altman into a corporate thriller-satire that struck a chord – Cue audience applause at the end.
The surprise is that Altman isn’t the main centre of this film. That’s Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov), a Russian-born prodigy by way of Israel with a PhD at 17, who literally bursts into the room and earns a seat beside Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance, the film’s voice of reason) by one-upping him with a vexing equation. Google pays over $40 million for their start-up, then waves off Ilya’s dream of AGI as science fiction. So he walks, (or was he pulled) into the orbit of Andrew Garfield’s Altman and Ike Barinholtz’s zany Elon Musk, who bankrolls a non-profit to stick it to Google. When Altman wants to go commercial, Musk pulls out and Microsoft’s $10 billion walks in, to Ilya’s quiet dread.
Borisov plays him as a man who “cannot lie” yet can “feel the AGI”, a tentative midwife unsure the baby should be delivered. OpenAI CTO, Monica Barbaro’s Mira Murati is the film’s moral spirit level, increasingly rattled by Altman’s gift for bending the truth. Garfield gives Altman all the charm and none of the benefit of the doubt: slippery, self-serving, ready to knife anyone, which makes a late scene with ousted Altman and an actual sword both funny and pointed. The coup, recreated with fly-on-the-wall intimacy, is the most gripping stretch, even if we’ve read the headlines.
There are jarring edges, (some funny, some tedious but way too long at 140mins), and it doesn’t always know whether it’s satire, campfest or a chilling warning about AGI being left in the hands of Beavis and Butthead like nerdy tech bros. The Telegraph review called it the scariest film of the year; I’d settle for the most timely. Glad I was in the room.