Curator Watchlist
A sharp premise and a few strong satirical instincts are undercut by a thin feature-length concept that many viewers found repetitive and too close to familiar billionaire-tech satire. If you like Jesse Armstrong’s dialogue-driven cruelty and can tolerate a more obvious, broader tone, there’s enough here to make it… Read more
Where to watch: Buy
Thu · 1h 49m
Director: Jesse Armstrong
Starring: Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith
A group of billionaire friends get together against the backdrop of a rolling international crisis.
Jesse Armstrong
Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith
A sharp premise and a few strong satirical instincts are undercut by a thin feature-length concept that many viewers found repetitive and too close to familiar billionaire-tech satire. If you like Jesse Armstrong’s dialogue-driven cruelty and can tolerate a more obvious, broader tone, there’s enough here to make it worth a look; if you want real escalation, depth, or a fresh target, it may feel like a retread.
Mountainhead has the ingredients of a nasty, timely satire: a crisis outside the walls, a circle of insulated billionaires inside, and a writer-director who knows how to make privilege sound absurdly self-justifying. The problem is that the movie often feels like it is announcing its point rather than discovering it, and the joke can flatten into the same note over and over.
The cast is game, and the dialogue has flashes of the clipped, humiliating rhythm that made Armstrong’s best work sting. But as a feature, it can feel like a compressed spin-off of a richer ecosystem, with the satire aimed at a target that already feels overfamiliar. The result is less a revelation than a reminder of how quickly this kind of material can curdle into mannerism.
If you’re in the mood for a chilly, talky, contemporary power comedy, there’s enough craft here to keep it watchable. If you’re hoping for a sharper thesis or a bigger emotional or comic payoff, this one is likely to leave you feeling that the mountain was bigger than the head.
Preet (3★) · 2426 likes
whole lotta mountain not a lotta head
matt lynch (1.5★) · 2290 likes
Not remotely surprised that Jesse Armstrong decided to turn what was probably a Succession finale idea that got immediately shouted down in the writers' room into a movie Adam McKay would blame you for not liking. I'm as pissed as anyone that society somehow continues to reward these venal accelerationist tech pigs for deliberately dismantling civilization but it's somehow even worse to me that TV showrunners are endlessly allowed to get away with toothlessly "satirizing" the softest targets imaginable.
patrick (1★) · 2059 likes
kinda impressively bad. jesse armstrong's sell for mountainhead, his first project since succession, has been that he decided to "run at it fast rather than stew on it for five years.” he would have been wise to wait because this is a turgid, boring nothing of a film and it’s clear armstrong has little clue what he’s actually trying to say. he obviously got the itch to write some elon fanfiction and HBO were more than happy to accommodate. yes,
Taha (2★) · 1290 likes
Where is Luigi Mangione when we need him most?
stella (3.5★) · 1188 likes
they should’ve invited kendall roy
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wealth and privilege, billionaire satire, tech power, crisis and insulation, moral rot, media and public relations, male friendship and rivalry, elite detachment
satire, dark comedy, drama, tech billionaires, apocalypse-adjacent, corporate power, class critique, ensemble, bleak, 2020s