The degree to which Mountainhead, HBO’s new black dramedy from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, will make you laugh depends almost entirely on how much news you consume about tech billionaires who see themselves as übermensch chosen by fate to shape the arc of history. The more time you’ve spent listening to Silicon Valley types wax poetic about reality being a simulation, “universal basic compute,” and how humanity is a “biological bootloader” for artificial intelligence, the less Mountainhead’s CEO characters come across as being amusing caricatures. But if you’re part of the lucky bunch that has never bothered listening to billionaires insist that they’re going to achieve immortality in preparation for colonizing Mars, Mountainhead might strike you as an incisive send-up of the uber-wealthy oligarch class.
Especially in this moment where we’ve all been able to watch some of the world’s richest tech overlords prostrate themselves before Donald Trump in hopes of amassing even more power, the movie’s depiction of tech bros flirting with the idea of taking over the world seems so plausible that it almost doesn’t work as satire. But each of Mountainhead’s lead performances is infused with a manic, desperate energy that makes the film feel like an articulation of the idea that, when you strip all the self-aggrandizing mythos away, billionaire founders are just people with enough money to make their anxieties and insecurities everyone else’s problem.
Though it’s narrative territory we’ve seen Armstrong explore before, Mountainhead is no Succession. Compared to Armstrong’s more expansive episodic work, there’s a breathless urgency to his first feature that reflects the speed with which he wrote and shot it. But the film does make you appreciate how dangerous and divorced from reality today’s titans of industry tend to be when left to their own devices.
Set almost entirely in a palatial lodge nestled high up in the Utah mountains, Mountainhead revolves around a quartet of absurdly wealthy frenemies who come together for a weekend of rest, relaxation, and metaphorical dick measuring while the rest of the world hurtles toward a doomsday scenario.
On some level, social media tycoon Venis (Cory Michael Smith) knows that the new generative AI tools rolling out on his Twitter-like platform, Traam, have the potential to incite chaos by feeding people deepfaked footage designed to keep them angry and endlessly scrolling. Venis has seen the news reports about multiple outbreaks of violence targeted at immigrants and ethnic minorities. He’s also heard commentators linking his creation to a widespread erosion of trust on a societal level. But with his net worth at an all-time high, it’s easy for the twitchy CEO to ignore all that bad press and dismiss the disturbing imagery flooding Traam.
Similar to Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Mountainhead frames AI’s ability to obfuscate the truth and manipulate people’s perceptions of reality as the kind of threat that should give everyone pause. But rather than telling a story about humans racing to stop a tech-driven apocalypse, Armstrong is much more interested in exploring the ways in which artificial intelligence’s potential for harm is directly connected to the worldviews of those who create it.
Venis isn’t the only tech mogul ready to roll his eyes as Traam’s AI continues to stoke unrest and violence around the globe. Almost all of his closest friends — a small group of men who call themselves the Brewsters — feel exactly the same way. James (Steve Carell), a steely Steve Jobs type who refuses to accept the reality of his terminal cancer diagnosis, sees Traam’s popularity as a sign that Venis is on the right path and setting himself up to corner the market on digitizing human consciousness within a decade.
Even though Jeff (Ramy Youssef), the creator of a rival AI toolset that can reliably identify deepfakes, has gone on the podcast circuit understandably trash-talking Venis, he can’t deny that Traam’s dangerous slop has led to an exponential growth of his own valuation. And as the “poorest” member of the Brewsters, multimillionaire health nut Hugo / “Soup Kitchen” (Jason Schwartzman), is more than willing to cosign basically anything his friends do. Some of it boils down to Soup’s need for an influx of cash for his next business venture — an ill-conceived wellness and meditation app. But the deeper truth that Armstrong repeatedly highlights is that groups like the Brewsters always need someone around who’s willing to play a game of boar on the floor or eat a soggy biscuit to make themselves feel like they’re all having a good time.
The desire to have a good time is ostensibly why Soup invites the other Brewsters to come spend the weekend at Mountainhead, his drearily chic vacation home that reeks of new money and a juvenile obsession with Ayn Rand. But once the group has gotten together and sent their assistants — most of the movie’s sparingly few women characters — away, it isn’t long before the boys’ deep-seated resentments of one another start bubbling to the surface. And when the unnamed president of the United States calls up Venis and Jeff to discuss how the Traam deepfake situation is getting worse by the minute, the group takes it as a sign that they might be looking at an opportunity to play and win a game of real IRL Risk.
Image: HBO
Given how relatively few places it physically takes its characters, Mountainhead does a solid job of not feeling like a claustrophobic play about delusional billionaires beefing on top of a mountain. Few of the Brewsters’ digs at each other are truly laugh-out-loud funny, but what’s impressive is how each of the characters feels like a distinct embodiment of the culture that gave birth to the modern celebrity tech founder archetype. Armstrong wants us to see these people as ghouls who are beyond high on their own supplies, but also as profoundly broken men whose fixations on biometrics and being seen as sigma men speak to a deeper sense of inescapable inadequacy.
Things like James’ tense relationship with his personal doctor and the odd, vaguely homoerotic game of wits Venis and Jeff start to play in Mountainhead’s third act are intriguing. But they’re also part of what makes the film feel like it might have been more compelling as a miniseries with enough time and space to show us more of how the Brewsters move through the world and what besides their money would make these four men want to spend time with one another.
Just when Mountainhead starts to get juicy and unhinged, it rushes to a dramatic climax that feels right-minded, but premature. It’s almost as if Armstrong means to leave you unsatisfied as a way of emphasizing how people like the Brewsters seldom get what they really deserve. As a piece of eat (and ogle) the rich social commentary, Mountainhead works fine if you’re craving a cheeky, surface-level indictment of tech barons who fancy themselves as gods. But if you’re looking for something more dramatic and substantive, you might be better off just reading the news.
Mountainhead also stars Hadley Robinson, Andy Daly, Ali Kinkade, Daniel Oreskes, David W. Thompson, Amie MacKenzie, and Ava Kostia. The movie debuts on HBO May 31st.
