Review: 'Mountainhead' is a crisp satire by the creator of 'Succession,' about tech bros on the edge of chaos
I’m not going to divulge too much about what happens in the deliciously dark comedy “Mountainhead,” and not because HBO asked critics not to — and provided a detailed list of plot points not to spoil.
I’m going to keep my trap shut, beyond the basic set-up, because the movie is a fascinating and entertaining artifact of biting satire in the year 2025, an age when billionaires don’t mind being caught talking casually about taking over the world or moving off of it.
Writer-director Jesse Armstrong, making his first feature film and his first project since wrapping up the Emmy-winning series “Succession,” sets the entire story in a ridiculously opulent mountainside mansion during a winter ski weekend. (The movie was filmed in Utah, mainly in a house near Park City that listed last year for $65 million.) The house’s half-billionaire owner, Souper (Jason Schwartzman), has invited three super-rich friends for a poker weekend, where the guys can hang out, nosh on endless plates of snacks, and not talk business. “No deals, no meals, no high heels” is the guys’ mantra.
Souper does have something he’d like to sell his billionaire buddies — a wellness app that he thinks can make up for some of the stressful toxic sludge the rest of the internet is distributing.
Some of that sludge is courtesy of Venis (pronounced like “Venice, and played by Cory Michael Smith), owner of a global social-media platform, for which he’s just introduced new web tools that make disinformation and deepfakes easier to create and harder to detect. Venis is the world’s richest man, we’re told, but it isn’t exactly improving his life.
Also on this trip are Randall (Steve Carell), the elder statesman of the group, who’s holding back some bad personal news, and Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who’s Venis’ longtime friend and current nemesis — because Jeff won’t sell to Venis a new A.I. program that will do everything Venis’ platform will do, without all the evil parts.
Soon after settling in at the house, all four men look at their phones, which are blowing up. News reports come in of unrest around the globe, some of it caused by the deepfakes generated by Venis’ new products. Hundreds are dying, cities are burning, and both markets and governments are jittery.
As the news comes in, our tech bros shift with alarming speed from denial — this can’t be our technology causing this, can it? — to bargaining, as they start considering how they can leverage this global chaos to their own advantage.
Just as “Succession” used the real-life Murdoch family as an allegorical starting point, one can look at the characters in “Mountainhead” in terms of nonfiction counterpart. Smith’s Venis is the easiest one to peg; his obscene bank balance and his fascination with finding a new planet both evoke Elon Musk. Carell’s Randall could be the weekend’s Bill Gates, comfortable with his wealth but thinking beyond it. Youssef’s Jeff and Schwartzman’s Souper are the yin and yang of that generation of technology — one inventing something and only dimly seeing its value, the other a hustler who wants to sell things people don’t want.
Armstrong’s dialogue is as fresh and as crisp as the first ski trails through new powder. He wrote the script early this year, and put the production into a fast pace — five months from first words on page to releasing it on HBO and Max — to keep the observations about the tech industry’s rewiring of human life to a dull roar.
All four actors are on their game, and one gets the feeling Armstrong challenged them to keep the number of takes down and the length of scenes growing. There’s a nervous familiarity in the performances, as if these tech giants are of suspicious of their industry as the mortals not on Mount Olympus trying to use their products. The four of them make “Mountainhead” something worth streaming the next time you’re hanging out with your buddies, contemplating how the world will destroy itself.
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‘Mountainhead’
★★★1/2
Debuts Saturday, May 31, on HBO, then streaming on Max (soon to be HBO Max again). Rated TV-MA for language and sexual dialogue. Running time: 108 minutes.