No need to get your Ayn Rand references ready — Mountainhead makes them for you, right at the top. When Jeff (Ramy Youssef) arrives at the high-altitude mansion where the entire film is set, he immediately makes fun of the place’s name. “Mountainhead? Like Fountainhead Mountainhead?” he scoffs. Written and directed by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong in his feature debut, Mountainhead is not the sort of satire in which sly details slip by along the edges, only to be noticed on rewatch. It’s a blunt-force-trauma comedy about the fate of the planet being decided at a billionaire boys’ weekend in which a quartet of tech CEOs and investors demonstrate how delusional, and how powerful, they’ve become. The film is a dead-on skewering of the high-on-their-own supply megalomania that now afflicts so many members of the techno oligarchy, who unfortunately also control the levers of the world. I found it incredibly unpleasant to watch, in a way that made me think about comedy’s limitations as a critique of power when its targets are already more awful and more ridiculous than any fictional version. We’re often told that mockery is one of the most effective tools when dealing with authoritarianism. But Mountainhead feels like a knowing wink from filmmaker to viewer right before we’re both mowed down by a bulldozer clearing land for an AI data center that will suck up all the region’s remaining water supply.
The four men in Mountainhead have dubbed themselves the Brewsters, and have been getting together for long enough that their irregular poker nights have built up some serious lore. The rules are no deals (though all they seem to talk about is business), no meals (the staff has been sent away and they’re supposed to just get by on junk food), and no high heels (presumably referring to the absence of women, though the personal lives of each of these guys are also in shambles). There are nicknames — Jason Schwartzman, whose sycophantic character Hugo is only worth $521 million, is “Soup Kitchen,” or “Soupes” for short, while Randall (Steve Carell), the senior member and éminence grise, is “Papa Bear.” There’s mention of an incident in Palo Alto when they all may have jerked off on a Pop-Tart and then ate it. And there’s a tradition of the men writing their net worths on their chests and then getting crowned with a diadem, a captain’s hat, and a sailor cap based on their rankings. Venis (Cory Michael Smith) is the current champion at $220 billion — a smirking sociopath whose social-media company, Traam, has just released a set of deep-fake-enabling content tools whose destabilizing effects on world governments come through via increasingly alarming phone alerts. In third place, but coming up fast, is Jeff, whose AI guardrails company is getting a serious boost from the disasters caused by Traam’s latest update.
I don’t think it’s possible to be too hard on technocrats, and Mountainhead makes the wise call to have its characters represent a slew of familiar attitudes, hang-ups, and corporate tendencies without drawing direct correlations to particular real-life figures. Ensconced in that glass-walled mountaintop folly, they look like pets in a luxury terrarium — so far removed from regular people that they can’t really comprehend typical concerns. Venis, in fact, doesn’t seem to think that other people are real, a tossed-off line that I assume is a reference to simulation theory. The script is dense with nods toward vapid attempts at moral philosophy, comparisons of everyone’s respective sleep scores, having a bifurcated brain, and these men’s desperate conviction that they’re just five to ten years from some sort of transhumanism, a belief that’s especially important to Randall, who refuses to accept that his cancer is terminal. It’s dialogue via X.com, the everything app, which is to say that it feels like an absolutely accurate assessment of one brand of Silicon Valley insularity, down to the idea that anything they do in the short term is permissible because it will all lead to the salvation of mankind. But it’s also like nails on a chalkboard — in a way that’s a lot like scrolling X.com, the everything app! — because it’s so unrelenting. Aside from the occasional reminder that Jeff has not yet caught on to the at-any-cost mind-set of his peers, there are few glimpses of humanity.
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That was the thing about Succession — its characters were monstrous, but the show never lost sight of their fleshly fallibility, their doubts and vulnerabilities. Our awareness that these people weren’t utter aliens only made the terrible things they proved capable of more awful. Mountainhead feels like the endpoint of our long prestige sheen journey toward eating the rich, which has volleyed us from Succession to Triangle of Sadness to The White Lotus to The Menu. All are comedies that assure us the elite are miserable, whether they get what’s coming to them or not; they also allow us to enjoy secondhand experiences of the luxuries they bask in and the terribleness with which they treat other people. But there’s no enjoyment to be found in Mountainhead, despite some very astute performances — most of all from Smith, whose character is on the verge but also primed to take everyone down with him. Armstrong’s movie invites us into this exclusive retreat while leaving us very much on the emotional outside of these characters who, should they destroy society, will just retreat into their respective bunkers while assuring themselves it’ll work out for the better in the end. “Nothing’s that fucking serious — nothing means anything, and everything’s funny and cool,” Venis spits at a certain point, a guiding philosophy from someone rich enough to believe that. In Mountainhead, the rich eat us, and there’s no catharsis to be found in that.
