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Spoiler alert. A popular verbal obscenity comes midway through Mountainhead. (The first word is four letters, the second is “off”.) It is a doozy too. Fans of Jesse Armstrong’s much-loved series Succession grew used to the phrase as a punchline, delivered by star Brian Cox as corporate overlord Logan Roy. For the showrunner, now making his debut as a feature director, it might even be a security blanket.
But you can also take the film as an unofficial sequel. Succession dealt with a legacy media empire. Now Armstrong trains an acid eye on the people who claim the same scale of raw power newspapers once had: the kings of tech.
The scene is Mountainhead, a pun on Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead that serves as the name for the ultra-luxe pile in snowy Utah where four old pals gather for poker and chat. The meetups are regular, though now given a frisson by what might be the total collapse of human civilisation. For that, we can first thank Venis (Cory Michael Smith), a CEO at the junction of AI and social media, whose latest bright ideas have brought market bedlam, a spike in sectarian violence and endless morbid symptoms of a global meltdown.
Still, on a personal level, life is sweet. This is more than can be said for his mentor, Randall (Steve Carell), arriving after receiving bad medical news. (It is Carell who later delivers that grandstand F-bomb.) Silicon Valley being small as it is, Randall also once backed Jeff (Ramy Youssef), Venis’s former business partner, and now the conscience of the group. That just leaves Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), who despite playing host at Mountainhead, is the runt of the litter: the only non-billionaire, still stuck pitching apps.
Of course, a lot of the fun here is the broad wink to the real-life figures the characters are in no way based on — in the same sense Logan Roy was absolutely not Rupert Murdoch. Randall is a ringer for svengali financier and Tolkien nut Peter Thiel even before he is referenced as “Dark Money Gandalf”. Smug, trollish and AI boosterish, Venis is a younger, buffer Elon Musk with a twist of Sam Altman. That may be one of Armstrong’s best jokes, given how much the two nemeses would hate being bundled into one character.
And Jeff? One dark little thought the film could leave you with is that there is, by contrast, no high-profile match for the lone voice pleading for caution and guardrails. (OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever might be the closest thing.) Hugo, meanwhile, has a purer dramatic function: his need for a cash a plot point tucked away for later in the movie.
As with The Thick of It, which Armstrong co-wrote, the sell is the fly-on-the-wall, an imagined eavesdrop among masters of the universe. The result is a frantic ping-pong of four-sided one-upmanship. There is much effortful frat-boy banter. Armstrong does a great line in the wincing comedy of unfunny people being oblivious to the fact. (Does anyone alive laugh harder than Elon Musk’s assistants?)
Once the razzing stops, there are still constant ego flexes, and clunking name-drops of great philosophers. “I take Kant very seriously!” Randall seethes, with the air of a red-faced toddler about to throw their dinner at the wall.
The humour is still pitched to waspish as some of the group now decide the spiralling chaos in the wider world is actually a historical cue. Next stop — at last! — the crushing of the dead hand of government by nation state. “That’s why I’m so excited about these atrocities!” Venis beams.
The movie was only shot in March, a breakneck fast turnaround for filmmaking. The sense of right-here-right-now can lend the satire real sting. The only snag is that you notice when the sharpness dulls. Given that the movie itself brings up the US presidency, what follows can feel fuzzy. And for all the references to New Zealand bunkers, AGI and race science, it becomes clear too that the movie isn’t built on first-hand experience, but is rather a deft comic assembly of detail culled from existing reportage. The natural audience may have already been trained on the data.
Still, you suspect the real-life models for Venis, Randall and the rest would fail to find the movie funny. What better mark of success could there be? (Also: it is funny.) The cherry on top is the mocking of the architects of the future being done with that dusty old-world device, a feature film, grounded in the human excellence of actors such as Carell and Schwartzman: it makes for an admirable gesture, even if the joke might soon prove to be on all of us.
★★★★☆
On HBO and Max in the US from May 31 and on Sky and NOW in the UK from June 1
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