BFI London Film Festival 2026 Preview: Musk
From one of today’s most acclaimed documentary filmmakers, Alex Gibney’s Musk is a whopping four-hour chronicle of the titular billionaire’s career, family and the unyielding number of controversies that lie therein. The documentary has been in development for well over three years, long predating Musk’s political alliance and subsequent feud with Donald Trump. Predictably, Musk would immediately deride the film as a hit piece and dub Gibney a “d****e” upon its announcement – to which the filmmaker would retort in kind – adding fuel to the fire of what was shaping up to be a monumental exposé. With a career spanning twenty-eight feature-length documentaries, it was only a matter of time before Musk was held to account by the same man who had unmasked Scientology, state-sanctioned torture and the U.S. government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The question remained whether the finished film could match the significance of its subject, as Gibney had so consistently achieved in his previous work. Yet upon leaving Musk’s preview at the London Film Festival, the only feeling I was left with was one of profound ambivalence, having sat through 232 minutes of a solid, but unextraordinary, documentary that would soon fade from memory.
The sheer scale of Musk's undertaking, both in its scope and breadth of interviewees, cannot be overstated. The documentary might be the most comprehensive attempt to date in recounting the man’s personal and professional life, its extensive roster of talking heads encompassing Justine Musk, Musk's ex-wife; Martin Eberhard, Tesla's original co-founder; Ashley St. Clair, a former conservative influencer and mother of one of Musk's children; Errol Musk, Musk’s father and alleged apartheid profiteer; and many more, all providing a sprawling portrait of their place in his rise to power. When these testimonies are allowed to breathe, they prove remarkably powerful and damning, both in documenting the number of fatalities associated with Musk’s companies and in exposing his own abusive behaviour. Those from Justine Musk, particularly in relation to their children, including Musk’s estranged daughter Vivian Wilson, piece together the image of a person she once loved becoming increasingly subsumed by reactionary and conspiratorial politics. These accounts are as disturbing as they are surreal, Ashley St. Clair recounting Musk’s extraordinary proposition that they should have “a legion of children before the Civil War”, revealing a man truly lost to extreme ideological convictions.
Following Musk’s refusal to provide any form of on-camera testimony, the most controversial aspect of the documentary by far has been its use of his AI-generated likeness. The intent seems clear in weaponising Musk’s own conviction in artificial intelligence against him, amalgamating his statements into an on-screen interview that directly rebuts the documentary’s allegations. The contradiction lies in the fact that the imagery generated is still intended to look impressive — which it remarkably fails to do. His AI avatar is a needless addition regardless, but in a documentary with this runtime, it becomes increasingly excruciating to sit through with each simulated interview. The 8-bit animated interludes, gamifying Musk’s previous corporate and political power moves from a first-person perspective, similarly outstay their welcome, feeling as out of touch as the memes Musk himself routinely posts on Twitter. These needless additions quickly wear thin as entirely unnecessary and – quite frankly – jarringly out of place in on-camera testimonial sequences dealing with, at times, highly sensitive subject matters. In a documentary already carried by the disturbing first-hand accounts of those who have suffered under Musk, their inclusion makes for a frustratingly uneven four hours in what could’ve been a generation-defining exposé.
With its UK release date as yet unconfirmed, Musk would be better experienced as a mini-series, split into instalments, whenever it eventually reaches HBO Max. There is a great documentary buried somewhere within this decent feature, the film constantly undermining itself with gratuitous stylistic flourishes and AI-generated visual interludes that should have been left on the cutting-room floor. It is undoubtedly worth seeing if you’re intrigued by its seemingly inescapable subject matter, but it is hardly the sort of viewing experience you simply cannot tear yourself away from. It's not one to be missed if you have the time, but definitely not one to die for if you have the choice.
Edited by Teddy D'Ancona, Co-Film & TV Editor
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