Matthew d'Ancona's culture: Mountainhead is a whip-smart dystopian comedy

New European

2 days ago

For those of us who have been in mourning since the finale of Succession in May 2023, travelling the world to watch its stars on stage as a form of grief management (reader, I went to New York), Jesse Armstrong's return as writer and director of this feature-length drama has been giddily anticipated. And it does not disappoint.
In contrast to the international grandeur of the Roy family saga, with its debt to Lear and Greek mythology, Mountainhead is a bottle drama about four super-rich tech bros – claustrophobically confined for the weekend to the palatial mountain lair built in the Rockies by Hugo (Jason Schwarzmann); known to the other three as 'Soups', for 'Soup Kitchen', because he is worth a mere $521 million ('Like Fountainhead 'Mountainhead'? Was your interior decorator Ayn Bland?').
Like a younger Elon Musk, Venis (Cory Michael Smith) is the richest man alive and has just released a new version of his social media app, Traam, which has four billion users. Though its unfalsifiable deepfakes are causing riots and bloodshed all over the world, the tech titan is unmoved: 'We're going to show users as much shit as possible, until everyone realises… nothing means anything, and everything is funny – and cool.'
His less wealthy but (slightly) more ethical friend and rival Jeff (Ramy Youssef) needles him for launching '4Chan on fucking acid' and does so knowing that – for all his bravado – Venis covets his own company's AI capacity that can bring a measure of order to the mayhem sown by Traam.
Completing the quartet is the older Randall (Steve Carell), known as 'Papa Bear' and 'Dark Money Gandalf', who bears a striking resemblance to Donald Trump's first powerful Silicon Valley cheerleader, Peter Thiel. Inclined to quote Hegel, Kant and Plato, Randall – who has terminal cancer – is privately hoping to exploit Venis's deranged tech research in order to upload his own consciousness to the grid. Naturally, Venis loves the idea of a 'transhumanist' future: 'Tron-biking around, digital milkshakes, robot hand jobs!'
Thanks to Armstrong's whip-smart dialogue, Mountainhead succeeds primarily as a dystopian screwball comedy; founded on the bathos of four men at a poker weekend casually discussing the means by which they might turn the chaos unleashed by Venis to their advantage. 'Maybe we do look at El Salvador as a dry run,' he suggests. But then again, why not 'coup out the US?' Even Hugo, the poorest of the four, dares to dream: 'If we take down China and the nation-state… now we're making memories!'
Again, it is left to Jeff to offer a measure of perspective. Are they sure that dissolving the nation-state and seeking global tech domination is a good idea? 'Because Randall, I do think you're boiling an egg with no water.' None of which endears him to the group's elder ('he is a decelerationist and a snake!')
If Succession was a bleak elegy to legacy media, Mountainhead is an even darker satire about the age that has followed, as Logan Roy knew it would. To adapt the grouchy patriarch's most famous line, such men may now rule the world; but they are not serious people.
THEATRE
Stereophonic
(Duke of York's Theatre, London, until October 11)
'You need to show up; you need to pay attention; you need to tell the truth; and you need to deal with the consequences. Right?'
Such is the advice of studio engineer Grover (Eli Gelb) to his assistant Charlie (Andrew R. Butler), as the two men seek to oversee a chaotic album recording that begins in June-July 1977 in Sausalito and ends a year later in Los Angeles. Though assumed to be a thinly-veiled account of the making of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours (1977), David Adjmi's extraordinary play – transferred from Broadway, having scooped up a record number of Tony nominations – has its distant roots in Led Zeppelin's cover of Babe I'm Gonna Leave You.
When Adjmi heard the track on a flight, he knew he had to write something about music. It took him a decade to develop and stage Stereophonic, with the help of former Arcade Fire member, Will Butler. The fruit of all that painstaking work is a drama of many layers and great subtlety, that uses the intense setting of all-night sessions in the studio – a glass screen dividing the engineers from the band – to drill deep into what makes the five performers tick, create music, and love and loathe one another.
There is Peter (Jack Riddiford), the increasingly monomaniacal vocalist and guitarist, his relationship with star vocalist and songwriter Diana (Lucy Karczewski) in sharp decline. Bass player Reg (Zachary Hart), ill from booze and cocaine, wraps himself in a blanket of wretchedness, squandering the love of vocalist and keyboard player Holly (Nia Towle). Simon (Chris Stack) is the British-American band's de facto manager, as well as its drummer. Beyond the walls of the studio, their fame is surging; within, they are a portrait of familial dysfunction.
Though Stereophonic brilliantly captures the golden age of the seventies album – and is studded with allusions to Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), the Eagles and the Watergate scandal – its power flows from the universality of the pressure-cooker conversations, rows and banter in which the characters reveal themselves. 'I guess I believe we're here to suffer,' Grover tells Reg. In contrast, each of the band members – to a greater or lesser extent – is a dreamer: hence, all the disasters, and all the magic.
FILM
The Ballad of Wallis Island
(Selected cinemas)
It cannot be emphasised enough that this wonderful movie is not one of those twee British romcoms in which middle-class people retreat to a remote landscape to discuss their difficult feelings. Directed by James Griffiths and written by longtime collaborators, Tim Key and Tom Basden, The Ballad of Wallis Island is a film of much greater power, wit and poignancy.
Wading ashore on a tiny Welsh island, indie-folk singer Herb McGwyer (Basden) is welcomed by Charles Heath (Key), a reclusive millionaire who is paying him £500,000 to play a private gig for an audience of 'less than 100'. From the start, Charles's remorseless banter and quips drive Herb to distraction: he calls him 'Dame Judi Drenched' after he falls in the water; describes his 'rider' of Monster Munch, Braeburn apples and Johnnie Walker Blue Label as his 'Winona'; and says of his own travels: 'Kathmandu? More like Kathman-did!'
Though Herb badly needs the money to pay for his next album, he is increasingly alarmed by Charles's manic eccentricity; by the lack of facilities on the island and its lone, under-stocked shop, overseen by the amiable Amanda (Sian Clifford); and by the dawning realisation that, in this case, 'less than 100' means 'one'. His host is an obsessive fan of McGwyer Mortimer, the folk duo of which Herb used to be half – until, nine years before, he parted ways with his partner in music and life, Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan).
'I'm in Misery,' he says to his manager from the island's payphone. 'I'm going to wake up with no ankles!' But a greater shock lies in store when Nell arrives on the island, accompanied by her husband Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen). Charles's dream is to use the power of surprise to encourage a musical reunion.
At this point – if it were called Folk Actually – the movie might have descended into intolerable schmaltz. But it does no such thing. Nell, who now lives in Portland, Oregon, and makes chutney to sell at farmers' markets, is distinctly unimpressed by Herb's desperate efforts to remain musically credible – including the acquisition of a large back tattoo and a series of 'collabs' with younger artists.
For his part, Herb is completely thrown by Nell's sudden presence and initially coils up like a scorpion. In this respect, we see unexpected parallels with Charles, a widower whose logorrhoea, it becomes clear, is a symptom of quiet desperation. To watch him play Swingball furiously on his own is to behold a man wracked by grief, anger and loneliness; just as Herb is a tight knot of pain and loss.
If there is a saving power in all this, it is Charles's passion for the music which reminds him of a happier time. And it is his total enchantment as they finally rehearse that helps Herb and Nell to remember why they were so good together, why the songs meant so much, and why they still do. The catharsis they experience does not reflect mawkish nostalgia but a gentle peace treaty with the past and a coming to terms with its place in their respective histories.
For Charles, too, there is tentative hope that his frozen emotions may now thaw. A movie full of heart, in the best possible sense.
STREAMING
Dept. Q
(Netflix, all episodes)
Four months after he is shot in an ambush that kills a police constable and paralyses his partner DCI James Hardy (Jamie Sives) from the waist down, DCI Carl Morck (Matthew Goode) returns to work – and is reassigned to run a new cold case unit in the station's shabby basement.
Based on the best-selling Scandi-noir thrillers by Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, Dept. Q transposes the drama to Edinburgh, where Morck is respected for his talents as a cop but is a constant source of aggravation to his boss DCS Moira Jacobson (Kate Dickie), under pressure from Holyrood to deliver results.
Created by Scott Frank (who was also behind The Queen's Gambit) and Chandni Lakhani, the nine-episode series spreads its wings and takes its time – to compelling effect. The through line is the unsolved case of lawyer Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie); missing, presumed dead, for four years.
Along the way, in a manner that recalls the early seasons of The Wire, the spectacularly anti-social Morck builds a team that includes Akram Salim (Alexej Manvelov), ostensibly an IT expert whose past in Syria is shrouded in secrecy, and Rose Dickson (Leah Byrne), a talented detective afflicted by PTSD. Morck himself is assigned a course of therapy with Dr. Rachel Irving (the always excellent Kelly Macdonald): help which he knows that he needs but is characteristically reluctant to accept.
There is also a debt to The Silence of the Lambs, which I will not spoil. The plot is twisty, complex and absorbing. Goode, playing completely against type, has never been better, matching all the darkness with profane gallows humour. Dept. Q is one of the best television dramas of 2025 and richly deserves a second season.