Mountainhead, directed by Jesse Armstrong, is now streaming on Neon.
Rating out of five: ★★★★
Yes, it does rhyme with Fountainhead and there is an Ayn Rand joke – okay, well, a pun – among the many high-brow zingers in this queasily topical black comedy, the first thing that Succession creator Jesse Armstrong has done since that remarkable television series.
There’s also some bickering over Kant – some actual Kant cant, if you will – but this is not set in the halls of academia but in a luxury home in Utah ski country. And as he did with Succession, and earlier as a writer on The Thick of It, Armstrong makes caustic entertainment out of characters who are as terrible as they are plausible and powerful.
Here, four tech titans have arrived by private jet for a weekend hang, free from the pressures of their billionaire lives and significant others. Only the world outside goes into meltdown due to an AI-enabled social media platform one of them has just unleashed. It means anyone can create deepfake videos of adversaries committing atrocities. Do they turn it off? Or do they fulfill their destiny as tech-bro Neros and stoke the fire as a “controlled burn”. Or as Steve Carell’s character Randall pontificates: “Are we the Bolsheviks of a new tech world order that starts tonight?”
If so, is Utah where they want to be? As Ramy Youssef’s character Jeff ponders: “I’m seeing LA’s good. We go bunker up there while I figure out a New Zealand sitch.”
For a movie which is mainly about four rich guys doom-scrolling, it certainly ratatats along on the razzing verbosity of its characters. And just as Succession revelled in its echoes of the Murdoch legacy media empire, Mountainhead has fun with who its characters most resemble.
As the paternal figure to the group, Randall seems an analogue to leading NZ citizen Peter Thiel while Cory Michael Smith’s Venis is a kind a photogenic hybrid of Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Elsewhere, Jason Schwartzman, the homeowner and only non-billionaire, for which he is nicknamed “Soups”, short for “Soup Kitchen”, is there as the suck-up useful idiot. Youssef’s Jeff is there to be the gang’s conscience – “are we sure we’d be better at running the world?” – as well as a man whose new AI-filter app could stop the chaos. For a price.
Inside the mansion, things escalate in strange and unpredictable ways, though the left-turn the story takes shows Armstrong doesn’t have the same gift for slapstick he does for stinging dialogue. Over it all hangs the question about whether you can send up a coterie which, like the president they have become oligarchs to, is beyond satire. But it appears Armstrong can, in a bleakly hilarious, exceptionally zeitgeisty farce. And I, for one, welcome our tech-bro AI overlords in a possible NZ sequel.
