Much like writer/director Jesse Armstrong’s series work on programs like Succession, In the Loop, and Veep, as well as his screenplay adaptation of Downhill, Mountainhead straddles the line between sensational storytelling and magnificently unlikable characters. You can’t help but want to hang out with these characters to see what terrible things they'll say about the world and each other.
Even as the story is ramping up, we sense that things in the world are not good. Thanks to new tools available on a social media platform created by the Musk-like Venis (Cory Michael Smith), people are creating fake news stories left and right for destructive purposes, causing riots and deadly attacks all over the world. The financial markets are crashing, and suddenly dozens of countries are nearly at war with each other over nothing real.
While all of this is going on, multimillionaire Hugo Van Yalk (nicknamed Souper, played by Jason Schwartzman) is planning a regular poker gathering among his billionaire buddies (they jokingly call him Souper because he has the least amount of money and they assume he eats most of his meals at a soup kitchen). These include Venis, who confirms at the last minute because he wants to convince another attendee, AI-creator Jeff (Ramy Youssef), to sell him his AI technology, making it easier for people to tell the real from the fake on his platform and hopefully calm the world down. The fourth attendee is elder statesman Randall (Steve Carell), taking on something of a Steve Jobs role, complete with a life-threatening illness that he wants a cure for immediately—and he’s quite disappointed in his doctors for not having discovered one yet.
Once they assemble, old tensions surface—especially between Venis and Jeff—and everyone is looking at world news updates on their phones in the hopes of seizing business opportunities during this global crisis, like taking over a struggling South American nation. Venis insists this isn’t his fault, but he still wants that AI tech right away, which Jeff refuses to sell him.
The precision of the dialogue is the first thing that jumps off the screen, and there are no weak links in this cast, with Smith and Carell really biting into their characters with a ruthlessness and lawlessness that is both complete and horrifying. Make no mistake: these are terrible human beings who need security at all times for obvious reasons, but getting a peek at them in private seems like a rare privilege and a new reason to hate the ultra-rich.
As one would expect, eventually the wolf pack turns on one of its own who is standing in the way of the type of progress only they can envision. At one point, they are actually looking at ways of taking over certain countries all over the world by arranging more turmoil, such as rolling brown-outs and instigating political upheaval. What begins as funny and hypothetical quickly turns into four guys seeing the globe as their personal monopoly board. The power dynamics and monetary rankings of these four men change during the course of their three days together at this isolated mountaintop luxury home. It’s unsettling for all of them and pure joy for us to watch them squirm.
Mountainhead could have easily been a stage play, but by setting it in this stunning location, it somehow feels, if not entirely real, then at least plausible on some level. I’ll think of these four selfish bastards (and those like them) in the years to come and wonder what monstrously destructive behaviors they’re up to. The film backslides a little in its cutting storytelling near the end, but even that can’t kill my enthusiasm for this work.
The film will premiere on Saturday on HBO and will then be available on HBO Max.
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