‘Mountainhead’ Review: Jesse Armstrong’s Acid-Singed Comedy About Modern Wealth and Power

Jesse Armstrong’s raucous dark satire Mountainhead takes place inside a Bond villain-worthy mansion perched on a snowy slope in Utah, where four tech bros are gathering for a guys’ poker weekend. The air of forced jocularity is almost as thick as the hyper-competitive tension and fog of unearned privilege among the frenemies. The bitchy digs fly from the start as each of the four jockey for position and earnestly show how disinterested they are in the social media-fueled chaos breaking out far from their enclave. The bros’ collective net worth is so vast that their nickname for the group’s needy and desperate punching bag, “Souper” (Jason Schwarzman), started as a mocking reference to soup kitchens, as he’s a mere half-billionaire.

Each are spectacularly wealthy Silicon Valley plutocrats whose manias and hang-ups closely resemble those of real-world titans and would never be tolerated if they didn’t have so many zeroes in their crypto wallets. Randall (Steve Carell) is the elder, a puffed-up pseudo-intellectual who name-drops Hegel and Marcus Aurelius so frequently that he probably has his own Substack about seasteading. The group’s awkwardly bullying clown is Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the thin-skinned and soulless CEO of the social media company whose just-released deepfake tools are fueling the racial and political strife blowing up the world.

The least defined character among the central foursome is A.I. developer Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who seems less overtly monstrous and the closest thing this group has to a voice of morality. But true to Armstrong’s pitch-black sensibility, Jeff’s conscience is a pretense that extends no further than the occasional soft jab at Venis or asking, “Hey, did you guys see this?” about another atrocity. While Jeff is somewhat underwritten, it would also have helped to have a sharper actor in the role. Next to Carrell’s ability to project venomous insecurity with a narrowing of his eyes, Smith’s unnervingly icy cruelty, and Schwarzman’s hilarious obtuseness, Youseff’s performance feels blander than his character’s self-soothing villainy deserves.

By following Succession with another acid-singed comedy about a slightly different subset of 0.01 percenters, Armstrong is sticking to a kind of satire he knows well. Mountainhead’s tech bros have many pathologies familiar from the Roy family in Succession, but even though just two years have passed since that show’s finale, the landscape of wealth and power mapped by Armstrong has changed immensely—though it feels more like devolution than progress. Vicious and powerful as the Roys were, the bros of Mountainhead would have annihilated that old-tech clan’s business and net worth with the flick of an algorithm, followed by laughter.

Armstrong is more invested in using coded language and signifiers of status to track finely calibrated conflicts between terrible people than delivering a plot-driven narrative. And this is arguably easier for him to get away with in a standalone film where he can riff on the themes he pursued with equally aggressive Mamet-ian dialogue in Succession but without worrying about, say, how to build in cliffhangers for a season finale.

In Mountainhead, Armstrong includes a transparently convenient development: Jeff’s A.I. happens to provide exactly the kind of fake news-monitoring that could save Venis from frantic politicians’ calls to shut down what Jeff describes as his “4chan on acid” tools before the world implodes. But the film’s momentum doesn’t depend on whether Jeff sells to Venis. The bleakness of Armstrong’s perspective takes it as a given that whatever these men do, the world will be the worse for it. That much becomes clear once the scheming bros start seeing the positives of government collapse and civil wars. “You’re always going to get some people dead,” remarks Randall blandly as their phones broadcast riots and mass killings.

This satire remains more about the implications of what these wannabe Nietzschean supermen say rather than what they do. During one especially harrowing stretch, Randall and Venis spin themselves up into fantasies about using the moment’s chaos to rewrite history, with themselves as the new world’s emperors. Armstrong peppers their dialogue with the buzzwords (“P-doom,” “founder energy,” “singularity”) beloved of the futurist-fascist techno-libertarian whose exhaustion with analog life on Earth powers their dissatisfaction. If there’s a moral here, it might be that the only thing worse than a competitive billionaire is a bored one.