The Artifice Girl

Sometimes, a movie lands at the perfect cultural moment. The journey from script to screen usually takes years, so it’s hard to capitalize on specific events as they happen. Which is why it’s so wild how often it seems to occur. Nelson Mandela passed away while Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom was premiering in the UK. Milk released a couple weeks after Proposition 8 passed in California. Cosmopolis came out around six months after the conclusion of the original Occupy Wall Street protests. Although to be fair, all of them had some other reason to be noticed: either they’re about a popular figure, or star some well known actor(s), or were made by a big name director.

The Artifice Girl has no such advantages, and so may be the biggest beneficiary of the moment of its release. It had a bit of buzz coming out of Fantasia 2022 where it won the Audience Award for Best International Feature. But on its own, that doesn’t mean much: it wasn’t even picked up for distribution until March, more than six months later. Which tells me it likely would have quietly disappeared, if not for one of the biggest news stories of the past twelve months, which continues to have huge ramifications throughout our lives, whether or not we realize it: ChatGPT (and LLMs more generally).

Regardless of your take on them and their potential (or lack thereof), they kicked off a huge conversation about AI and computer sentience and what it means now that the Turing test has been obliterated. What defines consciousness? How can we distinguish between a simulation of emotions and the real thing? Does the difference even matter? When does consent come into the picture? These are not questions to which The Artifice Girl pretends to have answers. But it does engage with them, playing them out on screen in a winding film driven entirely by conversation.

Gareth (Franklin Ritch) is being interviewed by Agents Deena (Sinda Nichols) and Amos (David Girard) of the International Child Welfare League (ICWL), under suspicion of possessing and distributing child pornography online. In reality, he’s been involved in entrapping hundreds of pedophiles and passing their information on to this very agency. But that’s not exoneration: no, that doesn’t come until he reveals that Cherry (Tatum Matthews), the girl in the videos, is a pure fabrication. Despite how realistic she looks and reacts, she’s naught but a purpose built computer model, a project he began after his employer failed to secure funding for the idea. She’s backed by machine learning and clever software, which combined with the low quality of internet chat rooms is enough to fool the predators he’s targeting. When he refuses to create a copy for the agency, they press him for what he’s hiding, at which point he drops the bombshell: while that’s how things began, she started operating wholly autonomously, despite no directive from him.

Thing is, as the audience member, you’ve probably already guessed that’s where we’re heading. It’s a case of the movie title being somewhat of a spoiler. Which can be fine, except the movie hits that beat hard, with a squared off view of Gareth and a slow zoom as he very deliberately emphasizes and enunciates every word, pausing for dramatic effect. That disconnect, where this is a huge deal to the characters but obvious to us, makes the entire beginning of the movie feel hollow and drawn out. The dramatic elements feel grating and unnecessary and obnoxious, and cause everyone’s behavior to be incredibly frustrating. Gareth not bailing on the questioning, Deena’s lies and hardball tactics, and Amos’ passivity. We know where the movie is going, at least for now, and so all are under heightened scrutiny until we get there.

Once we do, though, things immediately become more intriguing. Really, it’s all the conversation around the ethics and deployment of AI and what it means for the world that is at all interesting. I could care less about the drama between the characters: they’re fairly stock, adhering to well-worn tropes, and none of their performances are noteworthy (although Girard comes closest). There are some additional plot threads which are similarly unnecessary, although less egregious. For example, I don’t think we really get anything from the inclusion of the Clearwater incident in Gareth’s backstory. Sure, it provides implicit motivation for him to embark on this quest, but do we really need that? Isn’t the company he worked for enough? Same for the Maria Harbough revelation: it adds a bit of extra color, but no real substance.

There are a handful of these little side plots and details, which are intended to flesh out the world, but instead come across as spurious and distracting. I think Ritch (who also wrote, directed, and edited the film) was concerned it would be too short and slight without some additional human drama. He may well have been right. But what he chose to include doesn’t so much weave into the story as sit alongside it, mostly disposable without changing the context of the main story.

I do appreciate that each act takes place in a different time period. The opening inquisition takes place around 2025 or so. We then move 15 years into the future, somewhere around 2040, when the Cherry project has advanced and expanded. There are some new developments which lead to infighting and some fascinating and deep discussions about the nature of consent as it relates to an AI. And finally, we jump ahead another 30ish years to witness Gareth near the end of his life, coming to terms with all he’s done, and wondering whether he did the right thing. To which he gets a resounding and gut-punching “No”, in the best and most impactful moment of the film.

However, the movie can’t escape feeling like a stageplay adapted for the screen. There are only two proper locations: a conference room at ICWL, and Gareth’s living room, with a third being a shed which appears for only a few minutes in a flashback. To be fair to Ritch, I must imagine this is due to budget constraints, but it nonetheless makes the movie feel very constrained and small. We hear tell of events outside the walls, but we have no cultural context for what type of world is wrestling with the advances made by him and his team. It’s not a huge flaw, but it’s noticeable enough to deserve mentioning.

I’ve been saving the best for last: Tatum Matthews as Cherry. She’s incredible. We first met her when Gareth shows the agents “performance” mode, so she gets to act like a real girl. After a couple minutes of that, we switch to developer mode, where Matthews does an excellent job at imitating what you’d expect an advanced AI to be like: stoic, data-focused, relatively flat affect. It’s a stark contrast, but very well done. And it makes things all the more astounding when she has reason to flip to a more casual demeanor later on. Simply looking at a screen grab of the movie, it’s easy to tell which mode she’s in, as it’s not only vocal performance and speech patterns but just body language and how she holds herself. In essence, she plays three distinct characters throughout the film, and absolutely nails all of them. It’s remarkable, especially for an actress so young.

Ritch has put together an interesting if uneven tale, one which shows a bunch of promise, even if it doesn’t completely deliver. All the hallmarks of a young but promising filmmaker are here: solid vision, ability to execute reasonably well on a super limited budget, and good writing. He just needs to keep it up: the only way to hone one’s craft is to keep practicing. And even as such, the movie it worth checking out: just don’t expect a masterpiece.