Mountainhead is the movie for people who want more Succession but accept that Brian Cox’s Logan Roy and his vile but irresistible family are not coming back. Written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the Succession guy, it takes a similarly vile bunch of tech bros, deposits them in a swish mountaintop mansion and follows them over a weekend of escalating mayhem as the platforms and apps that made them rich wreak havoc in the outside world.
Armstrong has been telling this story – awful people being awful – for quite a while now, either comedically in TV shows like Peep Show, The Thick of It and Veep and more darkly in Succession. A surfeit of ambition and a lack self-awareness mark out his characters: people who can dish it out but can’t take it, thin and thick-skinned at one and the same time.
Here they are again, high on a hill with stunning views of everything except their own malfeasance, in a chrome and glass house whose name nods to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, the bible of self-styled philosopher kings and titans of the universe. These smartest guys in the world all cordially hate each other but have met for a “no deals, no meals” weekend because they have a shared history. Over a couple of days they’ll “razz” each other merciliessly, bomb about on snowmobiles, drink excellent wine, play poker and maybe incidentally discuss how to divvy up what remains of the world that’s not already theirs.
Meanwhile, outside, unfalsifiable deepfakes are flooding the world, thanks to the launch of generative AI by one of their number, Venis (it rhymes with menace rather than penis, though either works). Civil unrest is breaking out worldwide. Stock markets are in freefall. The world is going to hell in a handcart while Venis (Cory Michael Smith), Souper (Jason Schwartzman), Jeff (Ramy Youssef) and Randall (Steve Carell) trade yuks and measure the extent of their self-regard.
There is a pecking order. Randall, the silverback investor who gave most of the guys seed money at a crucial stage in their development, gets guarded respect. Venis is the richest. Souper, whose house it is, the most accommodating. Jeff is at the bottom of the heap, the least insulated by fabulous wealth and the closest any of them comes to having a conscience.
There is no direct read-across to Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel and other increasingly grimy looking colossi of the modern world, though Armstrong was inspired to write the film after reading about crypto poster boy and fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. But this is no character assassination by satire. Instead Armstrong is interested in the story the bros tell the world and themselves about their “neutral” platforms, even in the face of obvious damage done by them. Remember that movie from 2013, The Internship, when Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson went to work for Google, shot partly at Google HQ? How relatively benign it all was (creepy, nonetheless)? We’re a long way from that here.
Eventually, Luis Buñuel style, the external mayhem starts to manifest itself in the increasingly toxic interaction between Randall, Venis, Souper and Jeff. David Mamet and Aaron Sorkin are also in the mix as Armstrong builds towards his big point. Those tech-bro obsesssions – living for ever and escaping the planet – sound suspiciously similar to Nazi concepts of the Thousand Year Reich and Lebensraum.
Yet, beneath it all, the hull of a normal person occasionally peeps out. Physical frailty, fear, an estranged child or worries about an absent girlfriend reveal flesh and blood people. Armstrong doesn’t overdo it. He’s warning us about these guys, not asking us to empathise with them, and the actors deliver pitiless portraits of men building a new world order in their own image. Subtle it ain’t, and that’s the point.
Mountainhead – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
