Directed by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, Mountainhead exists in the same “eat the rich” satirical mode as the hit HBO series but hits a wall at every turn. A contained, stage-like production, it follows the reunion of four tech industry leaders and rips its plot from contemporary headlines about deep fakes and AI. However, it doesn’t engage with its characters, or its political material, beyond glancing blows. The result is a film that – despite its strong performances – constantly meanders, and feels distinctly malformed.
In a lavish mountain mansion above Park City, Utah, tech up-and-comer Hugo (Jason Schwartzman) – aka “Souperman,” or “Soups” – plays host to a gathering of his old friends, collectively known as the Brewsters. Eager to please, Hugo slots comfortably into the backdrop. Schwartzman is impressive at making himself feel small, though the flimsy writing leaves Hugo feeling like a vestigial tail, lacking any real purpose in the story.
Schwartzman’s co-leads, on the other hand, play immediately more well-rounded startup moguls, though this doesn’t necessarily make their characters good fits for Mountainhead either. Corey Michael Smith plays Venis, a character who skillfully hides the way critical news headlines affect him. Before he even arrives at the snowy getaway, he learns that his social media website has platformed so much misinformation that it’s led to violent outbursts worldwide (an allusion to Facebook’s admission that its lack of moderation resulted in real-world violence in Myanmar), allowing Smith to capture a mounting pressure en route to a potential explosion.
The oldest member of the closed circle is Randall – played by an intentionally distracted, disconnected Steve Carell – a successful investor whose secret illness shifts all his concerns towards uploading his consciousness to the Cloud (a technology still far in the future). And the fourth and final member of the group is Ramy Youssef’s altruistic Jeff, an unexpected arrival – given the words he and Venis have indirectly exchanged in the media – whose AI company excels at separating fact from fiction, potentially holding the keys to Venis’s problems.
As the quartet catches up – exchanging profanity-laced barbs that struggle to be snappy or amusing – global news headlines pushed to their phones and broadcast on television hint at a growing financial crisis, owing to violent hate crimes in volatile regions and a slew of other causes that feel tossed into the mix at random. What’s happening on the other side of characters’ screens isn’t as important as the impact it has on them – which is to say: their public image and their bottom lines. However, Mountainhead’s alignment between how the characters see the world and how the camera presents it to us – Hugo’s diminished importance, the half-baked news items, and so on – leads to a near-constant disconnect. In crafting a flimsy world outside the characters’ windows, Armstrong seldom clarifies the impending domino effects for them, resulting in empty drama when they begin making rash decisions.
Rather than letting the characters’ thoughts, actions, and flagrant regulation-skirting speak for themselves, the mounting absurdity of their denial and desperate financial decisions is generally explained away in dialogue – as is the Randian significance of the title. Laying one’s thematic cards on the table isn’t inherently a bad thing, but in Mountainhead this usually takes the form of Jeff’s moral sermonizing, as though he were an embodiment of the movie’s conscience, directing us towards exactly how to feel about the unfolding turmoil. Any reaction shot that might’ve been given room to breathe (or to be awkwardly funny) instead finds its emotional pause filled with Jeff’s didactic explanations of why the other characters are in the wrong.
Beyond a point, it’s hard to wonder why Jeff is even part of this story – both as a character who, in all likelihood, wouldn’t associate with any of these people (or lead the kind of industry he does), and as a piece of the dramatic puzzle. It’s hard to truly classify Mountainhead as a satire, given how much it over-explains itself. It’s more of a straightforward PSA – but at least it has a fun musical score to prevent things from getting totally boring.
Armstrong may be a prolific writer and television showrunner, but this is his first real directorial effort beyond two short films in the 2010s, and his inexperience shows. Cinematographer Marcel Zyskind’s camera may be loose and free-flowing, but the filmmaking lacks the energy and urgency needed to make a story like this one click. The drama rarely contains a sense of clashing perspectives, or any real shared history beyond a few allusions to Venis and Jeff’s past disagreements. It plays, on the surface, like a late Succession episode in which existing tensions come to a head, only without the all robust pre-existing relationships to make the financial jargon interesting or the moral conundrums remotely challenging.