At the luxurious Mountainhead resort in Utah, four men gather for a fun hang, united by one thing: Their staggering amounts of money. These are men worth hundreds of millions, if not billions, thanks to their involvement in tech and other industries (the companies they own are fictional, but have real-life parallels that aren’t hard to track). Bonded in this way, Randall (Steve Carell), Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), Venis (Cory Michael Smith), and Jeff (Ramy Youssef) have created a nice little fraternity with its own lexicon, nicknames, and rituals, like a ceremony in which their respective net worths are compared and then rewarded with different hats. They’re at the literal top of the world.
While things seem peaceful up at Mountainhead, the outside world isn’t quite so lucky: The social media platform owned by Venis has just launched a new feature that enables users to create instant deepfakes, and the result is a massive spread of violence across the world, people rioting in the streets over both fake atrocities as well as the real atrocities that occur in response to the fake ones.
Venis isn’t worried about the chaos — Venis, in fact, is thrilled about where this chaos might lead. And that’s about when the technocrats in Mountainhead start talking about how maybe the world would be a better place if they just… took it over. They certain have enough money and power to do it. Why not?
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There’s a very good reason, one that Armstrong not-so-subtly reveals over the course of the film: These guys are idiots. Not in the obvious ways, but in that way that happens when you’ve been surrounded by yes men for so long that you no longer have any self-doubt, and no longer can tell the difference between your bad ideas and your good ones. When you’ve been treated as a genius by the outside world so often that you actually start to believe it, even though your “genius” is rooted in a lucky break, or acquiring a company whose inner workings you don’t quite understand but know can generate profit.
At one point, a character makes an offhand crack about how one of them “can’t code for shit,” but there’s really no indication any of these guys actually know how the tech that’s made them rich works. All while they talk in a blase fashion about being “post-human” in the next five years — Venis is sure that tech will be ready. He says it with the same confidence as a CEO promising a Mars base by 2028.
Over Succession‘s four seasons, creator Jesse Armstrong developed a real talent for tearing down the self-importance of the Roy family, and as writer and director of Mountainhead he deploys a similar strategy. “Stupid people talking like they’re smart” basically defines 75% of the dialogue from Succession, and it’s fascinating to see Armstrong find a new angle on it, peppering these lines with more invented slang that these guys definitely think makes them sound cooler than they are.
Mountainhead (HBO)
There was an emotional core to the Succession story, though, that brought some recognizable humanity out of its characters — specifically, the fight for a kiss from Daddy. The lads up on the mountain, meanwhile, are all about posturing amongst themselves, even as real destruction begins to pile up outside.
Over the course of the 110-minute runtime, a few notable twists escalate the action, leading to some of the movie’s wildest dark comedy, played like the driest of champagnes. Yet Mountainhead isn’t all that cinematic in its execution: It’s better approached as a self-contained experiment in storytelling, one that would translate pretty easily to the stage given the opportunity.
This cast proves especially game for that: Cory Michael Smith (Gotham, Saturday Night) is a live wire on screen, his almost manic certainty unwavering, while Steve Carell keeps his ability to emote tempered, delivering one of his most reserved performances to date. Ramy Youssef’s Jeff might be the only one with a fully functioning conscience, a quality that sets him apart from the others, especially Jason Schwartzman’s forever brown-nosing Hugo — the “poorest” of the bunch, and always aware of that.
The major downside to Mountainhead is that for those who didn’t enjoy Succession because the characters weren’t that likable… well, imagine watching a quartet of Kendall Roys all trying to impress each other. Armstrong’s dialogue flows like no one else’s, but there’s something just a little bit unbearable about listening to stupid people talk like they’re smart, and Armstrong doesn’t pull away from that aspect.
While Mountainhead was first announced in January 2025, it was filmed in March — pretty much concurrently with news reports about what happens when you let an unqualified idiot play his chainsaw games with government infrastructure. It’s hard to imagine the timing being better for this movie as a result, yet it doesn’t promise any solutions or hope for the problem it acknowledges: The way wealth can warp a human soul. The one problem money can’t fix.
Mountainhead premieres Saturday, May 31st at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and Max. Check out the trailer below.