Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead Is 'Succession' On Shrooms

Jesse Armstrong knows how to write men who mistake their moral bankruptcy for charisma. If Succession was Shakespeare in a Manhattan boardroom, Mountainhead is a stoner comedy with a doctorate in ethics, buried under Patagonia puffers, crypto-speak, and apocalypse denial.

Armstrong’s directorial debut is a blistering satire of the silicon elite, and it plays like a twisted, tech-age Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, if George and Martha were four billionaire man-children holed up on a snowy peak while the world below them burned—literally.

The premise? A tech-bro getaway weekend at “Mountainhead”—a pretentious, $90 million Ayn Rand-inspired chalet named with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Our hosts: the four Brewsters, a band of pseudo-intellectual, terminally online moguls whose combined net worth could solve world hunger but who instead use their time debating whether reality exists and if genocide is, you know, disruptable.

The setup is a tech-dystopian parody so close to our reality it barely qualifies as fiction. Venis (Cory Michael Smith), a hyperactive founder of a social media platform called Traam, has accidentally triggered global chaos with a half-baked AI update that allows deepfakes to spread unchecked. (Also, yes, his name is “Venis.” As in venal. As in penis. Welcome to Armstrong’s brand of subtle.)

Venis, aware that his tech has triggered global uprisings, does what any modern mogul would do: he retreats to Mountainhead and starts microdosing with his three closest frenemies: Jeff (Ramy Youssef), the only one with a conscience and a rival AI tool that can stop the crisis; Randall (Steve Carell), a terminally ill transhumanist philosopher-CEO; and Soup (Jason Schwartzman), a wellness app founder with a net worth too low to command respect from the others. Poor guy’s only got half a billion to his name.

Steve Carrell as Randall in Mountainhead (2025)HBO

Naturally, Venis wants Jeff (Ramy Youssef), the only semi-grounded member of the crew and creator of a rival “good” AI, to sell him the patch that might fix the mess—without having to admit fault. The film then essentially locks these four men in a modernist glass box and watches them stew in paranoia, greed, envy, and the kind of casual nihilism that only a generation raised on TED Talks and stock options could produce. They get drunk, do shrooms, say things like “Do you believe in other people?” and occasionally glance at videos of cities being firebombed.

For a film where the stakes are “end of the world,” Mountainhead is gleefully claustrophobic. There are barely any women, just one panicked assistant who’s dismissed early like a lamb avoiding slaughter. The Brewsters sit around a firepit, doomscrolling images of riots and civil wars caused by their app, while debating whether this might all be good for valuations. “Chaos is opportunity,” Venis chirps. “Like Uber in 2014.” You can practically feel Armstrong’s keyboard shaking with glee as he types.

There’s an absurdist set piece where the president calls in on Zoom to beg them to fix the crisis, and the boys—wearing luxe robes and sipping matcha—debate whether answering would kill the vibe. Another highlight: a blackout game of “AI charades” where Randall mimics human suffering while the others guess which ethnicity is being attacked in a fake video. It’s grotesque. It’s hilarious. It’s also frighteningly plausible.

What I love about Mountainhead is that its obsessed with the pathology of billionaire logic: the belief that breaking the world is fine as long as you’re the one who gets to rebuild it. Armstrong doesn’t just satirise these men; he diagnoses them. The film posits that they don’t really believe in other people, only markets. That they see chaos not as catastrophe, but as arbitrage. That they are, in fact, too stupid to be this dangerous—but here we are.

And that’s the film’s tightrope walk. Mountainhead is savagely funny in places—Armstrong’s dialogue still bites like a feral animal—but it rarely achieves the emotional precision that made Succession land its punches so devastatingly. These aren’t characters; they’re grotesques. They’re funny, sure. But hollow. The Roys were monsters, but you saw the soft tissue behind the snarl. Here, you get memes dressed in Uniqlo cashmere.

Venis is Zuckerberg on Monster Energy. Randall is your philosophy-major cousin who discovered crypto. Soup is the guy who microdoses and tells you capitalism is a pyramid scheme, while pitching his fourth failed startup. Only Jeff, played with quiet restraint by Youssef, offers something vaguely resembling a soul. But he’s also the least interesting—kind of the Kendall of the bunch if Kendall had never done blow or cried in a pool.

There’s a version of Mountainhead that could’ve been a mini-series: more space, more layers, more time to understand why these men cling to each other like tech bros in a lifeboat made of stock options and body dysmorphia. As a film, it ends up feeling like an extended bottle episode of Succession—brilliant in its barbs, but ultimately confined.

But maybe that’s the point. Mountainhead isn’t about resolution. It’s about living in a world run by emotionally stunted billionaires whose neuroses are now policy. Armstrong doesn’t offer catharsis—just a mirror. One where the reflections are rich, ridiculous, and far too real.

The world may be ending, but hey, the Wi-Fi’s still good.