Say what you will about Succession, it has created a taste in the viewing public for Corporate Jargon dramas. You may not know exactly what’s happening when Harper Stern executes a big trade in Industry, but you know enough to be stressed along with her. The law talk on Suits may get to be a lot, but you can still follow along with the story.
Now, the creator of Succession, Jesse Armstrong, is moving on with a feature film that takes the Corporate Jargon drama as far as it can go before taking an abrupt right turn into a farcical murder thriller.
Mountainhead begins with the mountain retreat of Hugo “Souper” Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman). The house is called Mountainhead after Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, and he’s called Souper because he only has a couple of hundred million to his name, making him the poorest of the group, quickly establishing the kind of obnoxious humor these men are into. He hosts his billionaire friends, Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith), Randall Garrett (Steve Carell), and Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef.)
While the banter between the four begins as friendly, it quickly escalates as the new AI features on Ven’s app Traam spark unrest across the world. From their ivory palace, the four discuss what so much political tension could mean, even wondering if they could spin it and create their own technocratic world order once everything inevitably falls apart.
The only path forward for Traam’s disinformation machine seems to be Bilter, Jeff’s fact-checking program, which has skyrocketed in value since Traam introduced these new features. Ven wants to acquire the company, but Jeff is hesitant. Unable to accept any other reality, Ven, Souper, and Randall decide on a wild plan: murder Jeff and cover it up.
Of course, this is a group of tech bros, so this can’t just be a Strangers-on-a-Train-esque, straightforward deadly pact. Instead, they spend multiple scenes — frankly, the best scenes in the movie — arguing about what the most efficient murder weapon is. “I do want to say,” Souper says at one point, “regarding mental health, the trauma for us is something to consider.”
Mountainhead acts as a perfect satire of the ultra-rich, and how the guys who oversee everything often don’t know how to do anything. It may act as a fly-on-the-wall hangout movie for the first act, but it all comes crumbling down in a way Hitchcock would be proud of if he started listening to Jordan Peterson lectures.
