In his career first as a writer on the razor-sharp political satires The Thick of It and In the Loop and most recently as the creator of the global smash hit, Succession, Jesse Armstrong has demonstrated a unique talent for making dark fun of the powerful and the shallow self-importance of the world’s
one-percenters.
Mountainhead, his feature directorial debut, has the feel of a Succession spin-off, but turns out to be a biting and timely takedown of tech-bro plutocracy. Armstrong has once again delivered a super-smart, bitterly barbed attack on the digital era and the dangerously insecure men who sit at the top of it.
The Mountainhead in question is the sterile, expensive, glass-encased alpine Utah retreat of Hugo “Souper” Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzmann), a neurotic mindfulness app tech mogul who’s drawn the short straw of hosting a regular poker game with three friends who happen to be tech bros and some of the richest men in the world. There’s Jeff (Ramy Youssef), a seemingly liberal AI developer whose tool uses a sophisticated filter to allow users to tell the difference between fake and truthful imagery and information.
Randall (Steve Carell) is a veteran tech investor who has the phone numbers of all the world’s leaders and, after a recent cancer diagnosis that he refuses to accept, is keen to find out how long it may take to upload his consciousness to the cloud to give him virtual immorality. Finally, there is Jeff’s evil antithesis, Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the world’s richest man, who has no qualms about the fact that his recently launched AI creation tool, unleashed on his 4-billion user social media platform, is permitting anyone to make hyperreal deepfakes that are resulting in devastating upheavals around the world.
The parallels are easy to see here, with Venis serving as an obvious version of the egomaniacal madness of Elon Musk, Randall standing in for the quietly dangerous libertarian investor class represented by figures like Peter Thiel and Jeff offering a misguided still somewhat liberal tech billionaire image of pre-Trump-era Mark Zuckerberg. “Souper” gets his nickname because he’s worth only half a billion dollars, so still only “the soup kitchen” title holder in his multibillionaire bros’ materialist fraternity house.
The weekend mee-tup is supposed to be a chance for these masters of the universe to decompress, engage in some hard-hitting but harmless razzing and mega-billion budget deal- making that will increase their personal value and further change the course of the lives of the ordinary people in the world far beneath Souper’s Olympus mega-lodge.
Venis is looking for a deal from Jeff that would either allow his AI to become less controversial or, more worryingly, destroy his rival’s morally conscious AI tool and eliminate its threat to his seemingly unstoppable rise to eternal global domination. Randall is ready to write a mammoth check to the AI bro who can guarantee his virtual immortality before cancer takes his body. Souper is just hoping that he can convince one of his pals to push him into “bill status”.
Armstrong’s particular talent for memorable zingers is given full rein in the opening sequences where the bros get into some serious razzing and pretend that they’re all there for poker and hangout time. Sure, their phones keep pinging with alerts that inform them that Venis’s AI tool is busy changing the actual geopolitical landscape of the world faster than a snowmobile, but these annoying messages from the world of mere mortals are only increasing their personal wealth at supersonic speed. When the world starts encroaching on their Gods-seat — the president frantically calls, millions of people around the world start rioting, the second-richest drops to third-richest and Souper looks like he might break into the billionaire’s club — things take a nastier turn.
What follows is a dark, depressing stripping down of these uber-rich immortals as three of them decide that their plans for the future of the world, and their roles as directors of it, won’t work unless they get rid of the fourth bro. Their pathetic and ill-planned attempts to kill him only serve to reveal that beneath their egomaniacal exteriors, they are immature, psychologically unformed children with the survival capabilities of oafish panda bears.
Impressively turned around, with Armstrong shooting the film in March this year, and finishing it in time for release just more than two months later, Mountainhead is a film that benefits from its deliberate links to real figures whose influence on the world has been allowed to run riot in recent years.
It’s not so much about densely layered characters as sharply realised caricatures. The plotting may fall apart a bit towards the final chapter but its brilliant one-liners and timely dissection of the dangers that Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Thiel and their ilk pose to the world are welcome at a time of uncertainty and chaos. It’s a sobering reminder that not all that glitters is gold and that sometimes messianic figures are not so much King Midas as emperors without clothes.
- ‘Mountainhead’ streams on Showmax from June 2.
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