{"id":126343,"date":"2025-05-23T22:00:11","date_gmt":"2025-05-23T22:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/126343\/"},"modified":"2025-05-23T22:00:11","modified_gmt":"2025-05-23T22:00:11","slug":"mountainhead-review-tech-bros-face-off-in-jesse-armstrongs-post-succession-uber-wealth-satire-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/126343\/","title":{"rendered":"Mountainhead review \u2013 tech bros face off in Jesse Armstrong\u2019s post-Succession uber-wealth satire | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jesse Armstrong has returned with what feels like a horribly addictive feature-length spin-off episode from the extended Succession Cinematic Universe \u2013 though without Succession cast members. It is set in a luxurious Utah megalodge which winds up resembling the Dr Strangelove<\/a> war room, mixed with the apartment from Hitchcock\u2019s Rope. Mountainhead is a super-satirical chamber piece about the deranged, cynical and facetious mindset of the uber-wealthy, the kind of people who think about ancient Rome every day, though not about Nero and his violin. It may not have the dramatic richness of Armstrong\u2019s TV meisterwerk while the pure testosterone of this all-male main cast (minus any Shiv figure<\/a>) is oppressive \u2013 though that is kind of the point. The pure density of weapons-grade zingers in the script is a marvel.<\/p>\n

Our heroes are four unspeakable American tech plutocrats, a billionaire boys club with one mere centi-millionaire who isn\u2019t up to \u201cbill\u201d status; this beta-male cuck of their peer group is nicknamed \u201cSoup Kitchen\u201d because of his poverty, and he is their eager host. They are exactly the kind of people with whom legacy media aristocrat Logan Roy (played in Succession<\/a> by Brian Cox) would once grit his teeth and take meetings, vainly hoping for investment. These masters of the universe are getting together for an alpha bros\u2019 hang-slash-poker-weekend, razzing and bantering with each other with deadly seriousness about their respective wealth levels, at this mega-lodge that is called Mountainhead. As one guest asks: \u201cIs that like The Fountainhead? Your interior designer is Ayn Bland \u2026?\u201d<\/p>\n

They are: Venis, played by Cory Michael Smith, a preening Elon Musk figure who has just dropped a whole new set of AI-creation tools to his social media platform which is allowing anyone to create explosively divisive deepfakes, and so the guys\u2019 phones are now pinging with news of imminent global war. Steve Carell<\/a> plays grey-haired Randall, the ageing member of the group, an OG investor and a sort of Peter Thiel type who is repressing thoughts about his cancer diagnosis, calling his doctor \u201cstupid\u201d and brooding about uploading his consciousness to the net as a posthuman. Ramy Youssef plays Jeff, the relative liberal of the group; he is a very un-Bezos Jeff, like a Biden-era Mark Zuckerberg with a touch of Nick Clegg. Jeff\u2019s team have developed a filter allowing users to distinguish real content from fake which Venis wants to buy, maybe because it\u2019s profitable, or maybe to suppress it. Jeff keeps acidly mocking his comrades in ways that will remind you of Shiv or maybe Roman. And Jason Schwarztman is Soup Kitchen, or Soups, who yearns pathetically to bring out a new meditation app.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

As chaos spreads out there in the super-poor world, the guys \u2013 who in any case despise nation states with their tiresome regulatory interventions \u2013 discuss the need to \u201ccoup out\u201d South American countries or even the US. Things get even darker from there. Throughout it all, the impossibly sophisticated backchat continues, like background radiation, with the guys competitively insisting on how hilarious it all is: \u201cNothing means anything \u2013 and everything\u2019s funny!\u201d Yet Venis earnestly insists his platform can save the world: \u201cOnce one Palestinian kid sees some really bananas content from one Israeli kid \u2013 it\u2019s all over!\u201d The guys are driven mostly by macho recklessness; they loathe \u201cAI-doomism and decelerationist alarmism\u201d.<\/p>\n

So what happens when the chaos they\u2019ve unleashed on the world\u2019s systems actually impacts on them personally in their Mountainhead hideaway? Well, it\u2019s a flaw in the film. At one point, Soups turns the tap on and no water comes out. How is this crisis going to work out? A little perfunctorily, as it happens. More than any comedy or even film I\u2019ve seen recently, this is movie driven by the line-by-line need for fierce, nasty, funny punched-up stuff in the dialogue, and narrative arcs and character development aren\u2019t the point. But as with Succession, this does a really good job of persuading you that, yes, this is what our overlords are really like.<\/p>\n

Mountainhead is on HBO and Max from 31 May, and on Sky Cinema and NOW from 1 June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jesse Armstrong has returned with what feels like a horribly addictive feature-length spin-off episode from the extended Succession…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":126344,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-126343","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114559400256540423","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}