Mountainhead gets nowhere near the polished vitriol of Succession

There are few American shows more acclaimed and successful in the past decade than Succession, Jesse Armstrong’s peerless study of the corrupting influence of money and power, as illustrated through a Murdoch-esque media dynasty led by Brian Cox’s bull-like Logan Roy. The series was magnificent because it blended hysterical, unexpected black humor (step forward the excellent Matthew Macfadyen as Tom Wambsgans, who is hilarious virtually every moment he’s onscreen) with the serious thespian pyrotechnics of a starry cast including Cox, Kieran Culkin and the great Jeremy Strong, who, rumor has it, did not believe that he was making a comedy but a serious study of moral decay. It would have been good if Strong’s conflicted character Kendall Roy had shown up in Armstrong’s follow-up to Succession, a witty but tonally uneasy stand-alone film called Mountainhead.

Mountainhead has a great deal in common with the earlier show, not least in its focus on the to-ings and fro-ings of the 0.00001 percent, in this case a gathering of four tech bros at an isolated mountaintop retreat. The senior man of the four is the Peter Thiel-esque magnate Randall Garrett (Steve Carell) who has recently received a diagnosis of terminal ill health. The wealthiest is the Elon Musk-like Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith), whose Traam social media platform might be about to make him more money than God, but is also causing international unrest, thanks to its use of generative AI to spread disinformation that Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef) has been developing with his company Bilter. And for light relief, the host of the group, Hugo van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman) is the only one among them who isn’t a billionaire, with his net worth being a comparatively trifling $521 million.

Armstrong knows this kind of material, and this milieu, inside out, and there’s a great deal of pleasure to be had from the four actors interacting with one another in the coldly scenic surroundings of van Yalk’s sterile mountainside house. Obviously, the title nods to Ayn Rand, and there’s an excellent joke about the host’s boringly moneyed taste (“Who designed this? Ayn Bland?”). As anyone who has seen Succession knows, Armstrong can do witty, caustic back-and-forth better than virtually anyone writing today, and he nails the preening insecurity and alpha male antics of this foursome. Even Garrett, who initially appears to be a more sympathetic character thanks to his illness and the casting of the usually likable Carell, is swiftly revealed to be an egomaniac douche who is fixated on uploading his consciousness into a computer program that will allow him to live forever, after a fashion.

If the film – which was written, cast and filmed in fewer than six months, which must be something of a record by industry standards – had been content to follow the travails and arguments of this arrogant quartet, it could well have been a success. Yet there is an overarching anti-big tech storyline that gradually comes through the movie, and that is a depiction of how Traam’s ability to spread misinformation is gradually leading to global chaos on a grand scale. Images of social breakdown are glimpsed on CNN, to the tech bros’ initial mild curiosity, but as it becomes ever clearer that the world is on fire, issues of responsibility fall upon their lofty shoulders.

I was often reminded of Black Mirror, and Mountainhead plays out like a wittier, nastier version of many of that show’s better episodes. But it gets nowhere near the polished vitriol of Succession, which made you invest (if not care, exactly) in the fates of the Roy clan. Here, you’re moderately engaged by the characters’ awfulness, but it is only a passing diversion.  Armstrong makes his directorial debut here, although the blandly anonymous staging suggests that he is a far better writer than he is a filmmaker, and I wonder if a crueler (or more experienced) director might have made this a more compelling film. Certainly worth a watch, then, but don’t expect Succession in the mountains; that brilliant show remains sui generis.