Inside Mountainhead: Jesse Armstrong’s Chilling Tech Satire for the AI Era

You’d think the end of the world would be louder.

But in Mountainhead, it plays out in a snow-capped mansion with designer interiors, high-stakes poker, pharmaceutical-grade drugs, and a group of billionaire tech bros too far removed from reality to notice that their creation, an AI gone viral, is burning the world down below.

Jesse Armstrong’s first feature post-Succession tries to be a sharp satire about capitalism, digital hubris, and what happens when the power in the hands of those at the top becomes too much to handle. Too clever for its own good, with way too many references that if you miss one, you feel left out or straight out dumb. It’s a race to keep up with it. It’s bleakly funny but in an absurd way.

But let's start with the good: the dialogue, much as to be expected, slaps. It’s intelligent, nasty, almost too smart for its own good, like an Amy Sherman-Palladino character mashed with Adam McKay, speaking entirely in Twitter subtweets and off-brand TED Talk monologues. There are moments when the script soars, particularly in the scenes between Cory Michael Smith’s unnervingly calm Venis, a walking manifestation of unchecked power, and Ramy Youssef’s Jeff, the only one whose moral compass still seems to point north, and which ultimately causes his demise.

There’s undeniable fun in watching these men, high off their own egos, spiral into philosophical debates about whether collapsing governments or disinformation-fueled riots really count as consequences if you’re not directly pulling the trigger. The answer, by the way, is yes. Obviously yes.

But the film’s strength is also its weakness.

Armstrong has always had a gift for writing self-important men talking past each other. But in Succession, there was a counterbalance, emotion, irony, grounded pain. Mountainhead  is colder, more sterile.  After a while, watching these four billionaires intellectualise the apocalypse feels like being stuck at a dinner party surrounded by sociopaths, and you can’t leave. The world’s on fire, and they’re flipping a coin on whether to pull out an extinguisher or throw more gasoline on it. 

There’s no denying Mountainhead intends to tap into something chillingly current. In a time when real-life AI developments are advancing faster than governments can regulate them, and billionaires treat space exploration like it’s a new theme park ride, the film’s premise is really meta. It reflects a world where the most powerful people are the least accountable, and where misinformation spreads faster than truth ever could, faster than a mean gossip in high school. 

But here’s where the film stumbles. The satire becomes so exaggerated it loses weight. By the time assassination attempts and accidental overdoses enter the mix, it veers from dark comedy into farce. Not everyone minds a little chaos with their critique, but for a film clearly trying to say something, it feels counterintuitive. 

There’s a sense that Armstrong is using this movie just to vent, to channel his frustration with Big Tech, AI ethics, and perhaps even post-Succession expectations. Which is is why the dialogue often feel smug and show-off-y. 

Steve Carell’s performance is a highlight. He’s quietly devastating as Martin, a former tech visionary now caught in his own moral inertia. Schwartzman and Youssef balance the absurd and sincere with solid chemistry, though the all-male cast feels like a missed opportunity for further dimensionality. It's a very specific kind of male narcissism on display, intentional, yes, but exhausting too. 

Mountainhead isn’t a bad film, it’s actually quite good in places. It’s intelligent, beautifully shot, and sometimes bitingly funny. But there’s a disconnect. It never really reaches the audience, never invites us in. We’re left watching from a distance, almost feeling like we’re not smart enough to keep up.

Like the billionaires it portrays, the film is brilliant and blind, powerful and disconnected, provocative, but ultimately unable to truly connect.

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