Cory Michael Smith, Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef and Jason Schwartzman in HBO's Mountainhead (2025). Photo / HBO
What do you do after Succession?
Whom do you skewer once you’ve impaled the world’s media titans and their deeply dysfunctional families on their own hubris over the course of four seasons?
That’s easy. You go after the tech bros.
Mountainhead is the latest from Succession writer-director Jesse Armstrong – no surprise, it’s available on HBO’s streaming service, Max – and it’s something more and rather less: a feature-length film that places four obscenely rich Silicon Valley overlords in a snowbound mansion as the world burns down around them and they plot to leverage the situation to their profits and power.
It’s a comedy, and a brutally dark one, that draws blood and appalled laughter for two-thirds of its running time before jumping the shark in the final stretch.
Once again, a brilliant TV writer finds the compact format of a two-hour movie more challenging than expected.
The cast makes Mountainhead work as well as it does. Cory Michael Smith (the young Chevy Chase in the recent Saturday Night) plays Venis Parish, the swaggering young CEO of Traam, the world’s most popular social media platform; the analogue is Mark Zuckerberg, and the wardrobe is Steve Jobs, but the character’s outsize ego and aggressive utopian double-talk place him closer to Elon Musk at his scariest.
Traam has just released a suite of artificial intelligence tools that allow the creation of deepfake images and videos; the result has been worldwide violence and tottering global markets, a societal meltdown that the quartet refuses to let ruin their poker weekend.
Venis’ friend, rival and former co-founder Jeff (Ramy Youssef) has created a better and more ethically transparent AI product – “AI with guardrails,” he calls it – that Traam might be willing to buy if Jeff’s willing to sell. (He’s Sam Altman, or thereabouts.)
Their host is Hugo, aka “Souper” (Jason Schwartzman), who has bought the mansion and named it Mountainhead (“Who was your decorator, Ayn Bland?”) despite having a net worth merely in the hundreds of millions as opposed to the others’ billions.
Acting as self-styled “Papa Bear” to these horrible young men is their mentor and investor, Randall (Steve Carell), himself insulated from humanity by his immense wealth and connections.
“The great thing about me is that I know everyone, and I can do everything,” Randall says at one point, and it’s not bragging if it’s true.
Unfortunately, as we learn at the film’s start, he has terminal cancer, a fact he’s refusing to accept so long as the promise exists of downloading his existence to the internet.
“You’re first in line,” Venis assures him. “We’ve just got to do a mouse, a pig, 10 morons, then you’re the first brain on the grid.”
I could spend the rest of this review quoting the dialogue, so precisely does Armstrong eviscerate the pretensions and delusions of America’s techno-elite. (A particular favourite: “Have these olives been pre-pitted? That means some greasy little monster from Whole Foods has had his fingers in them, and I don’t like that”.)
As evening draws near and the world’s capitols keep burning, the debate turns to whether it’s time for these masters of the universe to take charge.
“Do we take over a couple of falling nations and show how it’s done?
“We could probably buy Haiti.”
As long as Mountainhead is cooking along like this, it’s a smart, if stagy, satire along the lines of Wag the Dog – exaggerated for comic effect but truthful enough to sting.
Sadly, Armstrong never figures out how to wrap things up. Mountainhead takes a turn for the potentially violent and definitely absurd when some members of the group start turning against others and the film becomes an antic, increasingly untenable farce.
I can say no more, but it’s a shame; a black comedy that addresses viewers’ very real fears about where the lords of technocracy are taking us turns inward, evaporating satire into slapstick.
Watch it for the performances, then. Carell dials down his likeability to play Randall as a breathtakingly casual monstrosity; Youssef slyly convinces us that Jeff may (or may not) have something like a conscience; Schwartzman is a neurotic fusspot as the zeta dog of this bunch; and Smith makes Venis a figure for our times, an uber-bro so convinced of his superiority that his sanity departed several CPU cycles ago.
“Do you believe in other people?” Venis asks Randall. For him, it’s an honest question.
Mountainhead is streaming now on Neon.