Mountainhead Review: A relevant, promising satire undone by heavy talk and blunted ideas

Time of India

01-06-2025

Story: Four ultra-wealthy tech billionaires gather at a mountain mansion in Utah for a retreat as the world reels from a global crisis sparked by AI-fuelled misinformation.
Review: 'Mountainhead' is a strange, slightly maddening film that wants to show us just how deluded tech billionaires can be. It's a drama, with flashes of black comedy, trying to get into the minds of the ultra-rich who genuinely believe they're here to shape the world — maybe even save it. The film revolves around four central characters and sets up an intriguing premise, but it never quite takes off. It often feels stuck in its own head, and the characters speak in such lofty, philosophical riddles that you begin to wonder who, exactly, this is for. Coming from Jesse Armstrong, the creator of the brilliant 'Succession,' it's hard not to feel let down by a film that could've had so much bite.
The plot revolves around a group of four super wealthy tech friends who call themselves the 'Brewsters' and have gathered at a luxury mountain retreat in Utah called Mountainhead — a not-so-subtle nod to Ayn Rand's 'Fountainhead.' There's Venis (Cory Michael Smith), who runs a social media platform called Traam that's accidentally spreading AI-generated deepfakes across the globe. Then there's Jeff (Ramy Youssef), whose AI tech is spiraling into misuse, and Randall (Steve Carell), a powerful investor now grappling with terminal cancer. Their reunion, hosted by Souper (Jason Schwartzman), starts off with some banter and passive-aggression but soon shifts into something darker. They turn their moral compass toward Jeff, eventually coming to the conclusion that his invention is a threat to humanity. All of this unfolds while the world burns outside, and they continue sipping rare whisky, as if the apocalypse were just another business issue to debate.
Armstrong treads familiar ground — the obscenely rich, cocooned from consequence — but where 'Succession' was sharp, messy, and emotionally alive, 'Mountainhead' is colder and more abstract. It also draws directly from real life: Venis' denial of responsibility for Traam's impact echoes Zuckerberg's detachment during the 2016 US presidential election, while Randall's fixation on cheating death recalls Peter Thiel. A close watch will reveal glimpses of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Sam Bankman-Fried in the characters too. There are clever moments, especially when the film leans into satire — like when Souper writes everyone's net worth in lipstick on their bare chests or when Jeff's wealth overtakes Randall's by some obscure metric. But those flashes of absurdity don't carry through the whole film. Much of the dialogue is dense and philosophical, peppered with Kant and Plato, and after a while it stops feeling smart and starts feeling like noise.
The performances, though, are solid across the board. Jason Schwartzman, Steve Carell, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef do what they can with characters who are often more like ideas than real people. The film does find a bit of momentum toward the end, when the outside world's chaos finally seeps into Mountainhead and shakes the group out of their bubble. It's the only point where the story feels like it has real stakes. Until then, it mostly meanders, unsure whether it wants to be a satire, a character study, or a tech-world fable.
In the end, 'Mountainhead' is more of a warning sign than a fully formed film. It has some compelling ideas — and certainly no shortage of ambition — but it's weighed down by its own cleverness. It wants to say something urgent about power, tech, and the people shaping our future, but it often gets lost in its own intellectual fog. There are moments that stick, but not enough to make the whole thing land. In the end, it comes across as a sermon disguised as a satire.