Mountainhead Review: Billionaires Ruin Everything
Streaming Movie Review - Drama/Comedy - HBO Max
For years, Jesse Armstrong cast his eye on the rich and powerful with his work on the show Succession. He brings that same energy in his new film Mountainhead, now on HBO Max, in which four billionaire (or almost billionaire) friends meet during a spate of global violence and economic turmoil that feels strangely prescient.
The Brewsters include Hugo Van Yalk, aka Souper (Jason Schwartzman), Randall (Steve Carell), Jeff (Ramy Youssef), and Venis (Cory Michael Smith). The four are meeting at Souper’s home in the mountains to play poker and enjoy one another’s company. They are not supposed to talk business while there. Still, when Venis launches his AI bot without fully understanding how it works, the world finds itself in a misinformation miasma that turns everything upside down, causing chaos on a global scale. He realizes that Jeff has an AI model that would help his work more intuitively without the mayhem, but Jeff is unwilling to sell, especially after Venis mocked him in an interview.
Meanwhile, Randall, the oldest of the group, is battling cancer and wants to see Venis’s plan to put human consciousness on the cloud come to fruition, so he wants to pressure Jeff to sell. Souper is trying to break into the billionaire status with his lifestyle app and find someone to invest a few billion in that venture. The weekend grows increasingly unhinged as the men have increasingly wild schemes on how to come out on top.
Mountainhead is a clear nod to the Ayn Rand novel “The Fountainhead,” which pits individualism against collectivism, with this group showing that their friendship is exclusively a transactional arrangement. I’m not sure what Armstrong’s beef is with the billionaire class, but he is not a fan, and it is apparent in this film.
The performances from the four leads are all excellent. Smith’s frenetic energy, coupled with the sheer volume of jargon that he spits out effortlessly, is impressive. Schwartzman fully embodies someone who can’t quite live up to his peers’ expectations. Youssef plays the character who likes to see himself as culturally engaged, but still will rejoice in his fortune amid global collapse. And Carell beautifully characterizes a man who is on the downswing and desperately wants to remain relevant. The four have a surface sameness, but their differences are brilliantly articulated.
Armstrong has a very specific directing style, and you can see that in Mountainhead. His use of hand-held camera shots brings you right into the middle of their conversations, leaving you feeling deeply uncomfortable at being so close to this kind of hatred masked as friendship. Using four comedians for this amplifies the comic aspects that are always present in his work, without this movie being a full-on comedy.
The role of billionaires on the global stage has become far more topical recently, with the world’s richest man wielding political power here in the United States. Mountainhead does an excellent job of reminding us that these are still just insecure men who don’t know how to start a fire.
Rating: 4/5
This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on May 31, 2025.