Mountainhead

dir: Jesse Armstrong

2025

Ye gods I fucking hated this movie.

But I have to be fair – I have no doubt the intention was to get us to hate these people with every fibre of our beings. After all, the writer and director of this horrible satire is Jesse Armstrong, probably best known for creating Succession: a series about a terrible media mogul and his defective children. Any resemblances to Rupert Murdoch and his cursed progeny are purely intentional.

The luxury that the series had was having the time to show these despicable characters from a number of different angles, such that the sheer enormity of their vileness could be appreciated from different perspectives, in numerous contexts, in countless ways, for years.

This here movie Mountainhead is just a movie, so we’re hopefully only ever going to have this exposure to these deeply shitty billionaires this one time for this collection of toxic minutes, 109 of them, to be exact. Amidst all of those minutes were scant moments where I didn’t want to kick my screen in.

There are some things too strange to satirise. The rise of the tech billionaires has given us these strange people to mock or, for many even stranger people, symbols to idolise, envy or bootlick. They have acquired political power through their control of social media or through the sheer magnitude of their wealth; they wield outsized influence with complete impunity, and we just shrug our shoulders, and go back to whatever it was we were doing before. Probably doomscrolling.

This stuff is well known if you’ve read any news at all over the last however many years, but the solution, unless you’re Luigi Mangioni, isn’t immediately clear. It’s one thing to joke about whipping the guillotines out, but the reality is that they are the new aristocracy, so high above us, and who’s going to lug a guillotine up into the mountains of Utah, anyway?

You can’t satirise the tech overlords lining up to kiss the ring of the orange emperor after his most recent inauguration, each paying an easy mill into his “inauguration fund” as tribute. You can’t satirise the fact that, for the last fifteen years, Elmo Husk, openly on drugs much of that time, has been promising each year at shareholder meetings that his cars will finally be able to safely drive autonomously, despite the fact that his shitty cars keep killing people whenever they’re let off the leash.

You can’t satirise a shitty person borrowing $44 billion in order to acquire a social media company and then reducing its net worth by 79%, and still he gets called a business genius because now Nazis and white supremacists can openly post without fear or ill-favour. He then self-appoints as some absurd figure in charge of achieving government efficiency which was achieved, somehow, by randomly firing people and not caring if or when things stopped working. The rocket company he owns keeps blowing up its rockets moments after launching them, which they call “rapid unscheduled disassembly”, definitely not “it blew up, just like the other three”. You see, you just have to repeat a line and people eventually stop correcting you, because if you’re a billionaire you’re obviously smarter than everyone else.

He bizarrely performs Nazi salutes and his devotees will tell us to our faces that we didn’t see what we thought we saw, like we’re the delusional ones. And having impoverished tens of thousands of people and their families, off he goes, back to his car company whose products no-one wants to buy anymore because of a collective cringing embarrassment, having continually failed but being immune completely from the repercussions of these failures (or from learning anything) because he’s too powerful, too wealthy to fail.

So when these main four people here do or say terrible things that anyone else would get a smack in the mouth for, we’ve kind of heard it before, and it doesn’t come across necessarily as the razor sharp wit we expect from someone with this pedigree. Can anything any of these characters do or say be any worse than anything we’ve heard on a daily basis about or from these wretched people?

An awful jerk with the unlikely name of Venis (Cory Michael Smith) is probably the closest obvious analogue to Husk, but he’s also an accumulation of tics and affectations that encompass the worst behaviour of awful tech moguls of an earlier time, like Jobs. He even does the tented finger thing, and I’m sure he was wearing a black turtleneck at some point. He has a social media company called Traam, and has just released “tools” that help people post, through the magic of AI, all sorts of fake news stories that look real. Hilarity ensues. Sorry, not hilarity, bloodshed and torment, as people across the globe start slaughtering each other over faked news stories.

Venis doesn’t care. He sees it, and the other three jerks see this as an opportunity to get even wealthier.

Randall (Steve Carell) is an older chap, and he’s been told by a doctor that he’s dying, to which he responds that the doctor must be a deeply stupid man, an oaf in fact. Just for pointing out that Randall’s cancer is serious and isn’t going to go away just from him wishing it to be so. I mean, I know these billionaires are masters of the universe and titans of virtual industries, and they should have the power to undo reality at a whim, but he clearly doesn’t have this power yet.

So he is simultaneously in denial and desperately looking for some kind of way to prolong his miserable existence. Venis says to him, in the same way Husk promises autonomous self driving Teslas are just around the corner, despite the hundreds of accidents and 51, I’m not making that up, 51 fatalities, that the tech to upload Randall’s consciousness into the cloud is just a few years away.

Being a super smart billionaire, Randall believes him. We guess that maybe he’s put aside his gargantuan intellect in order to believe something unlikely because he’s just so afraid of no longer gracing the world with his presence. Could he be the first rich fuck to deny his own mortality?

Jeff (Ramy Youssef) is meant to be the least reprehensible of the four, but I don’t know, he seems just as bad, though probably is not a complete sociopath like Venis. Jeff’s company has created AI guardrails or tools that can combat Venis’s AI chicanery. His net worth has multiplied on the back of that. In order to keep the world in its teetering state, Venis must therefore acquire Jeff’s tools, not to unleash them and retract his own reach, but to cordon them off, and not allow them to diminish what he has wrought.

The fourth fuckhead of the Silicon Valley Apocalypse is played by Jason Schwarztman, nicknamed Soups because he is the poorest of the four, hence the reference to a soup kitchen. He is the neediest and whiniest of all of them, but he’s also determined to rise from being a mere millionaire to a billionaire if it kills him, or, more importantly, if he has to kill someone else to do it.

It was, past a certain point, impossible for me to take this flick seriously, either as a drama or a satire. Yes, I get the point that people this rich can do what they want and face nil repercussions, no matter how venal or stupid their actions – I just never understood how killing one of their number would actually achieve what they wanted. It also, the film that is, goes plenty far to show how cowardly and incompetent they are even when their collective effort could result in what they want, but even that is mishandled, at least from my perspective.

Jesse Armstrong has seen and done too much for any of this to be anything other than exactly what he wants to say about these types of ultra-rich people, but this is satire so toothless I feel like I’m eating a meal at an old folks home.

And I hated, hated, hated spending any and all time with these people, for most of the flick’s duration. Because they’re so steeped in and inured to their own feculence, there was no-one around as an even miniscule version of a decent person, so it just makes it feel like I spent a weekend in a frat house watching bros light their own farts.

The performances are probably exactly what the director ordered, but none of these fucks is getting any flowers for these performances. Ugh. The guy imitating Husk is so repugnant the flick makes me loathe him even more, so I guess it’s not a complete lost cause.

I can say no more about this abomination. They have stolen enough of my time and thoughts as it is. Bleugh.

5 times eat the rich it’s the only way to keep them in line out of 10

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“Once one Palestinian kid sees some really bananas content from one Israeli kid – it’s all over!” – it’s not a Nazi salute; he’s just pointing at something nice - Mountainhead

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3314796569/