There are very few films that feel like a dare to their audience. HBO’s Mountainhead doesn’t just ask if we can still laugh at the people steering society off a cliff—it wonders if we’ve gotten too numb to even flinch when they hit the gas. Jesse Armstrong’s directorial debut is a bitter, breathless parable about four billionaires and the mountain retreat where their egos go to die. It’s not subtle. It’s not elegant. But it’s thrillingly ugly in the way only truth disguised as satire can be.

Welcome to Brewster Mountain: Population, 4 Maniacs

Set entirely in a gaudy, hyper-minimalist mountain lodge owned by one Hugo Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman, weaponizing every twitch of awkwardness), Mountainhead plays like a nightmare team-building weekend that got hijacked by Nietzsche, Hunter S. Thompson, and a hallucinated TED Talk. Hugo, better known to his frat-like clique as “Soup Kitchen,” is the weakest link in the group—a wellness startup guy whose ambitions are mostly flavored seltzer and vague fascist-y self-improvement apps. His guests: Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith), the jittery CEO of social media hell-platform Traam; Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef), a deepfake-spotting AI founder with a messiah complex; and Randall Garrett (Steve Carell), a Steve Jobs-Lazarus hybrid so terrified of death he wants to upload his soul.

What begins as a retreat spirals into something close to a ritual. Their AI tools are destroying society outside. Inside, they spiral into philosophical debates, desperate power plays, and actual violence. One gets the sense this is the only way these men know how to connect anymore: through destruction. That the movie dares to be funny about this—darkly, sardonically funny—is perhaps its most impressive trick.

Satire or Scream Therapy?

There’s a tricky tonal game being played here. Mountainhead isn’t content with cheap laughs or smug jabs at tech culture. Instead, it dares to make its characters deeply pathetic. They wax poetic about transhumanism and sim theory, but can’t make it through a weekend without psychological warfare and homoerotic mind games. Venis, in particular, feels like a Frankenstein’s monster of Zuckerbergian detachment and Muskian messiah delusion. Smith gives him an almost tragic edge, like a man who read Atlas Shrugged too young and never fully recovered.

Jeff, played with perfect restraint by Youssef, is maybe the closest thing the film has to a moral center, but he’s too complicit and too ambitious to escape the blast radius. Armstrong knows how to write this kind of man: the Ivy-educated, ethically conflicted guy who knows better but still wants in on the grift. The film works best when it lets these men reveal themselves through contradictions.

A Tight Space, A Big Statement

Shot primarily inside the Mountainhead lodge, the film uses its limited setting to its advantage. The space becomes increasingly claustrophobic as the men unravel. There are echoes of The Shining, Glengarry Glen Ross, even The Thing in how it uses isolation to strip away the layers of billionaire delusion. These men talk about saving the world with AI, but can’t even survive brunch together without someone bleeding.

There are women in the film, but only on the periphery: assistants, massage therapists, ignored voices on the other end of a phone call. It feels intentional, not a blind spot but a thematic choice. These men don’t see women; they see staff, props, audiences. It’s part of the larger thesis: that power, especially tech power, isolates and infantilizes. These men have more wealth than entire nations and all the emotional maturity of a high school debate team on ketamine.

The Ending: Abrupt or Accurate?

The film ends not with a bang but a crumpled, exhausted gasp—appropriate, perhaps, for a story about people too rich to fail and too broken to stop trying. It feels rushed, yes. But maybe that’s the point. The Brewsters, like the real-world tech gods they’re based on, don’t get catharsis. They get another round of funding and an army of simps ready to call them visionaries.

If there’s a flaw, it’s that the satire sometimes gets too comfortable. It doesn’t quite dig deep enough into the machinery of tech culture—the systems that make these men possible and unaccountable. But when it works, it burns.

Final Verdict:

Mountainhead is mean, smart, and very aware of the moment we’re in. It skewers tech moguls not just for their world-breaking products, but for the laughably fragile men they are underneath. Armstrong’s leap from TV to film is less polished than it is urgent, like he needed to get this story out before reality beat him to it. As satire, it’s not as sophisticated as Succession, but it might be angrier, funnier, and in its own jagged way, more necessary.