Mountainhead Serves up Ice Cold Tech Bro Satire

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For years, writer-director Jesse Armstrong made us privy to the back-room dealings and familial drama of the Roy clan on HBO’s Succession, drawing us in almost against our will to a place of empathy for an assembly of ultra wealthy people who fell somewhere on a spectrum between “embarrassing” and “detestable.” In his new HBO Max feature film Mountainhead, which was conceived, filmed and released in rapid succession since the start of 2025 for maximum timeliness, Armstrong returns to the same well of material, but finds it more difficult to access the same type of pathos in a mere 100-minute runtime. The four mega-millionaires and billionaires assembled here in a high-elevation luxury pad can never fully coalesce into actual human beings, and perhaps that’s the point–they represent the kind of self-styled “captains of industry” who now have their fingers on the proverbial button, in many ways more so than elected leaders of nations, and they wield their power without any actual, human connections tying them to concern or empathy for human beings. They speak in bloviating terms of saving the species, but they look at that species like a specimen in a Petri dish, rather than as a collection of real individuals. The only thing real to them is their own bottom lines.

Mountainhead promises and delivers a takedown of those tech bros who now rule our society, although there are few genuinely schadenfreude-derived smiles to be had in the exercise. The premise seems to offer up the idea that “ah, finally the rich will eat each other,” here–along with a “6-man line caught wild turbot,” of course–but at the end of the day the satire is more realistically bleak and depressing than it is wish-fulfilling or suggesting of any way forward. Armstrong seems almost resigned to modern life progressing in exactly the manner that Mountainhead depicts, which lends any humor here a decidedly gallows tone. That isn’t to say that the film isn’t often funny; it’s filled with crisply written zingers, albeit encased in dialogue that can sometimes be overwhelmingly dense. It’s just so timely, and so sadly accurate, that it may make you want to go outside and stick your head in the sand.

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One thing you cannot deny is that Mountainhead was impeccably cast for its central quartet. At the center of controversy is Venis (Cory Michael Smith, rocking a brilliantly stupid name and ultra-punchable face), the owner of a Twitter-adjacent social media platform called Traam, whose clearly underinformed ramblings about outer space colonization and “post-human” evolution mark him as the film’s closest analog to Elon Musk, though he’s more like Musk’s private fantasy of himself. The elder statesman is Randall (Steve Carell), a lion-in-winter whose lifetime of business acumen and wealth accumulation earn him deference and a reputation for sagacity among the other “Brewsters,” even as he grapples with a terminal illness diagnosis and obsesses over life-extension technology. The young upstart is Jeff (Ramy Youssef), the more empathetic-seeming founder of a crucial A.I. engine that can supposedly divine internet truth from falsehood. And our host is the perpetually brown-nosing and pathetic Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), whose profound sense of inadequacy as the least rich (only $521 million!), only non-billionaire member of the group manifests as a constant need for validation from the men he would desperately like to see as legitimate peers.

This mountaintop meeting is set against the straining and seemingly collapsing fabric of global society, giving our Brewsters plenty of material for conversation. The recent release of new A.I.-driven tools on Traam has seemingly given the rank-and-file users access to the power to create instantaneous, unprovable deepfake videos, and the result has become quickly spiraling global chaos. Venis is unconcerned: In his mind, those tools weren’t created for explicitly nefarious and violent purposes, and them being used that way is more akin to user error than anything. He doesn’t care that he’s effectively armed some of the worst people in the world with new weapons to create more intense division and inflame already existing conflicts–he’s instead confident that he’ll be able to skirt all responsibility, so long as he can acquire Jeff’s proprietary A.I. to act as a gatekeeper that can make his social media platform slightly more safe and slightly less toxic. Whether Jeff will be willing to play ball, though, is another matter, and the resulting power struggle could have deadly consequences both inside and outside of Hugo’s pretentious estate.

Much of the film’s first two thirds plays out as a steady patter of conversation revolving around the deepening world crisis that these men are both safely ensconced from, but also uniquely capable of influencing. They all live on their phones, processing headlines and cable news bulletins as they come in, opining on this nation’s central bank collapses, or that world city’s mayoral assassination, as unopened bottles of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon rest in the background. Carell’s Randall is frequently playing the role of steady hand and “everything is fine” reassurance specialist, the implication being that he is so wise and so experienced that he’s seen all these types of panics before–he speaks of the turmoil with a detestable sort of aloof contempt, like an absentee father who sees the entire planet as populated by his disappointing, unimpressive children. He’s always on the lookout for a silver lining or means of turning problems into profit, calling his cancer fight a “net gain.” In a film filled with the garish dialogue of admittedly intelligent people trying to sound far more intelligent than they actually are, Randall’s grand intellectual metaphors are the most punishing: At one point, looking at the global chaos and their rapidly forming plans to exploit it, he asks “Are we the Bolsheviks of a new techno world order that begins tonight?” You want to beg him to remember for just one moment that he’s a flesh and blood human being, and Carell is masterful in making you detest the guy.

Eventually, the focus of Mountainhead turns away from the erosion of global stability and inward toward the similarly disintegrating relationships between the Brewsters, peppered with dialogue and jokes that become increasingly audacious and absurd. The members plot each other’s deaths, contemplating rationales for why killing one of their group might be both logical and helpful to society, and workshopping the PR strategies that might be employed to smooth things over with the government or law enforcement. The suggestion to “mash his brain in a Nutribullet” gets floated. A supremely incompetent pillow smothering is attempted. Someone is moments away from being roasted alive in a sauna. A few business deals get done. You know, typical weekend with the bros.

In the end, though, Armstrong skirts by truly upending any of these ultra-privileged lives. Although there are moments in Mountainhead when it all seems like everything is about to come crashing down, its eventual reticence to truly punish or evolve its characters is perhaps its most damning indictment of them–they’re all covered in such a Teflon-slick sheen of oil that they can all slip by responsibility yet again, postponing a showdown with reality for yet another day in the future that we can all see will never actually come. Even their transgressions against each other are curiously impermanent, because they are, in many respects, the only people of any genuine importance in each other’s lives, status granted by the net worth numbers they at one point paint on their own chests as a symbol of hierarchy. What’s a half-hearted murder attempt or two among best frenemies? And if they stopped hanging out … well, how do you have a poker night without another billionaire to spar against, someone willing to co-sign your worst ideas and impulses? What, are you going to talk to the help?

Armstrong’s film is as dry and pitiless as thin air of the mountaintop itself, and it belabors some of its jokes on the Brewsters’ social dynamic to the point of pain. Some viewers will find its repartee too galling and wordy to digest, while others may simply find it photo realistic to the point of abject depression. Like it or not, though, Mountaintop throws into sharp relief the specific species of (pretty much universally male) human that society has anointed as both savior and destroyer, offering a grim chuckle as we circle our collective drain.

Director: Jesse Armstrong
Writer: Jesse Armstrong
Stars: Cory Michael Smith, Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef, Jason Schwartzman
Release date: May 31, 2025 (HBO, Max)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.