4 days ago
Mountainhead, review: Jesse Armstrong's takedown of tech bros is even more cynical than Succession
A Succession spin-off film? Well, not quite, but Jesse Armstrong 's feature-length satire of the extremely rich and increasingly powerful, Mountainhead (Sky Atlantic), doesn't stray too far from the Roy family formula, and features the behind-the-scenes involvement of a whole host of his Succession team, including composer Nicholas Britell. However, instead of tarring and feathering Murdoch-esque media empires, Armstrong (who writes and directs) has set his sights on the new money – the billionaire tech bros and their grandiose plans to 'disrupt' the world. It is, somehow, even more cynical than Succession.
This exquisitely performed dark comedy is a claustrophobic chamber piece that takes place in a Utah mega-lodge up in the snow-capped mountains, where four old pals – 'Mount Techmore' – meet for a poker weekend while the rest of the world seemingly falls apart. It is, in essence, a high-falutin' episode of Inside No 9. The reason for the global unrest is the world's richest man, Venis (Cory Michael Smith), a tweaked-out sociopath whose latest updates to his social media platform Traam have unleashed havoc, thanks to an explosion of fake news and generative AI. The markets are in free-fall, sectarian violence is erupting everywhere, politicians are being assassinated. The world order is ending.
While on the outside, Venis is thrilled by it all, he desperately needs the help of his frenemy Jeff (Ramy Youssef), whose sophisticated AI-filtering system could restore Traam's credibility and the world's sanity. Joining them for a weekend of tension and glorious one-liners are Steve Carell 's 'dark-money Gandalf' Randall, the elder statesman of tech bros, and host Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), a financial pygmy (he's worth a paltry half billion) who desperately needs the others to invest in his meditation app. He's called his tasteless pile 'Mountainhead' and, yes, that name is tackled early on by Jeff: 'What, like Fountainhead? Who was your interior designer – Ayn Bland?'
Needless to say, Armstrong's script is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the zingers, and you could spend an enjoyable evening in the pub debating your favourite gags, but it would all amount to nothing without Mountainhead's unsparing psychological insight. Venis is a terrific monster, a ripped frat boy who thinks he can solve the Israel-Palestine conflict with 'bananas' online content and is obsessed with turning the world population 'transhuman'. The quartet bandy their callousness and casualness towards human suffering with grotesque machismo, and sprinkle their jargon-heavy, ultra-online conversations with half-arsed references to Hegel, Plato and Kant.
When they get wind of the worldwide upheaval, the bros – apart from the minutely less terrible Jeff – smell an opportunity, triggering some serious God-complex one-upmanship. This leads to a nail-biting denouement that manages to be extremely funny yet without the sophistication of what came before it. As with Succession, Mountainhead is a caustic, defiant and righteously furious diatribe against the maniacal egos of those with all of the money and all of the power, but no vanishingly little moral fibre – and all wrapped up by the best jokes in the business.
