Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial to Debut at NY Film Festival

The New York Film Festival just added a premiere that feels perfectly timed — Luca Guadagnino's Artificial is set to screen at Alice Tully Hall on October 5, and the first official image has arrived, starring Andrew Garfield alongside Yura Borisov.

It’s a small surprise for anyone tracking the film’s rocky road: earlier reports suggested Artificial might skip the fall festival season. Then Neon stepped in, buying the rights after Amazon/MGM bowed out. Neon will now handle marketing and distribution, with those costs estimated around 20 million dollars.

Expect Guadagnino in the house. Expect a stacked cast too — Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro, Yura Borisov, Ike Barinholtz, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman and Chris O'Dowd among them. The image released so far hints at an intimate, tense chemistry between Garfield and Borisov that the festival hopes will stir conversation.

Dennis Lim, artistic director of the festival, called the film shrewd and contemplative, praising Guadagnino for finding a tone that guides viewers to the brink of our current AI anxieties. That description tells you what to look for: a movie that wants to be both emotionally immediate and intellectually probing.

According to NYFF notes, Artificial mixes thrills and human drama while probing a pressing ethical question. The narrative traces roughly two decades of machine learning research and technological leaps that have pushed AI into the heated center of public debate.

The story opens in 2003, when Ilya Sutskever, a Soviet-born computer scientist played by Yura Borisov, begins work on artificial neural networks under Geoffrey Hinton, portrayed by Mark Rylance. Ten years on, now at Google, Sutskever has a consequential encounter with a young entrepreneur named Sam Altman, played by Andrew Garfield — a figure who will later co-found and lead OpenAI.

Neon's acquisition came with a whisper of bargain — industry chatter says the studio paid a modest sum to secure the project after Amazon/MGM stepped away. Neon then agreed to shoulder a sizable marketing push. Still, the biggest question remains cinematic: does Artificial live up to the years of buildup, or will the surrounding noise prove louder than the film itself?

This will mark Guadagnino's fifth film showcased at NYFF, following Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All, Queer and After the Hunt, the last of which opened the festival last year. The 64th New York Film Festival runs from September 25 to October 12, and Artificial joins a lineup of other high-profile world premieres, including Tony Gilroy's Behemoth!, Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus Zero, Ava DuVernay's 14th, Tom McCarthy's A Statement, Paul Thomas Anderson's Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall and Carlos Reygadas's Jupiter.

Will Guadagnino have captured something definitive about the moment when technology outruns our moral habits? We get our first screening on October 5 — and the image already suggests he's aiming to make viewers feel the question long after the credits roll.