Mountainhead Review: Deepfakes and Deep Trouble

Jesse Armstrong steps behind the camera for the first time, shifting from the razor-sharp corporate intrigues of Succession into a self-contained chamber piece. As both writer and director, he’s assembled a lean production team that mirrors his television craft, trading boardrooms for a sprawling Utah estate that resembles equal parts Dr. Strangelove war room and Ayn Rand pastiche.

At its core, Mountainhead strands four tech-industry magnates in isolation just as Venis (Cory Michael Smith) unleashes a new deep-fake engine that ignites global unrest. The result is a weekend retreat turned high-stakes crisis, in which the gulf between profiteering impulses and real-world chaos widens with each pinging phone alert.

The drama pivots on collisions of ego and ethics: Venis, the Musk-style provocateur; Randall (Steve Carell), a venture veteran wrestling with mortality and digital immortality; Jeff (Ramy Youssef), whose “bullshit-detector” AI offers moral counterweight; and Hugo “Souper” (Jason Schwartzman), the under-funded host whose meditation-app ambitions feel quaint against planetary collapse.

Premiering May 31 on HBO/HBO Max and arriving June 1 on Sky Cinema and NOW, the film stakes its claim as a timely satire of unchecked innovation and the men who bankroll it.

A Lode of Irony: Place as Power Player

Mountainhead’s Utah megalodge stands less as backdrop and more as a fifth protagonist—its cavernous halls and soaring glass walls invoking both Ayn Rand’s objectivist grandiosity and the cold, strategic mise-en-scène of Dr. Strangelove’s war room. Walking those high-ceilinged chambers, I was reminded of indie thrillers that leverage a single location—The Invitation, for example—to heighten psychological tension.

Here, the mountain retreat doubles as a fortress of privilege, each panoramic shot of snow-capped peaks visible through floor-to-ceiling windows underscoring how far removed these tech titans are from the world’s storms they’ve unleashed.

Costume and color design echo that divide: the quartet’s tailored, muted-gray suits and pristine white cashmere sweaters contrast sharply with the ruggedness outside. It’s as though their wardrobes were airlifted in by drone, just like their data. This sartorial rigidity plays against nature’s unpredictability, reinforcing the men’s belief in control even as global unrest escalates.

Sound designer Daniel Pemberton leans into silence at pivotal moments—a sudden hush when Hugo flips the tap and no water flows, or the muffled quiet in the underground bunker—so that every emergency alert or phone ping snaps into focus. Those diegetic news bulletins, with their breaking chyron graphics and urgent voiceovers, serve as a constant pulse: the outside world bleeding into this insulated cocoon. It’s a technique I first admired in Nightcrawler, where city noise framed moral decay; here, it frames corporate callousness.

Even the smallest prop catches scrutiny: the bespoke poker set, chips stamped with net-worth figures, and the meditation-app demo station all speak volumes without a single line of dialogue. These details transform Mountainhead’s setting from mere scenery into a sharp satire of unchecked ambition.

Power Plays and Personas

In Mountainhead, the quartet’s dynamics hinge on how each player embodies a facet of contemporary tech megabro culture, their performances amplifying the satire through finely tuned tonal shifts.

Venis (Cory Michael Smith) feels lifted from the headlines. His portrayal of the Elon-inspired visionary pulses with swagger—he introduces his deepfake engine like a maestro unveiling a new symphony. When Venis quips, “Once one Palestinian kid sees some really bananas content from one Israeli kid, it’s all over,” Smith rides that line between absurd optimism and chilling detachment. I’m reminded of the nervous thrill I felt watching Christian Bale in American Psycho—Smith’s confidence gradually fractures as he confronts the real-world fallout of his creation.

Randall (Steve Carell) grounds the film in a darker register. He’s the “papa bear” investor who’s been diagnosed with cancer, yet he mocks his doctors with the same sharp wit he uses on his poker rivals. Carell layers his performance with quiet dread; a scene in which he discusses uploading his mind to the cloud echoes the existential worries in Charlie Kaufman’s scripts. Carell’s sardonic restraint makes those moments when he allows vulnerability—his voice cracking as he frets about life after death—particularly affecting.

Jeff (Ramy Youssef) offers the film’s moral counterweight. His “bullshit detector” AI isn’t just a plot device but a window into Jeff’s own ambivalence. Youssef delivers sarcastic barbs—he jabs at Venis’s hubris with the effortless timing of a stand-up routine—then folds into genuine concern when news alerts light up the lodge. He balances tech cynicism with a sympathetic core, recalling performances by Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network.

Hugo “Souper” (Jason Schwartzman) is the odd man out. As the host with “only” hundreds of millions, his efforts to impress the others—especially during the tap-water outage—play like an indie underdog story. Schwartzman’s comic timing shines when Hugo tries to salvage the weekend, yet there’s a tinge of pathos whenever he glances at his empty pool or fiddles with his meditation-app prototype.

Together, they observe a strict “No Deals, No Meals, No High Heels” code, yet alliances shift faster than chips at a poker table. A snowmobile excursion, meant as bonding, turns into a silent status contest, each man vying to outdo the rest. That oppressive testosterone crackles through every exchange, making the lodge both playground and prison for these self-styled masters of the universe.

Satire in Silicon Valley’s Shadow

Mountainhead strips away glossy PR to reveal how a handful of moguls control reality itself. The film’s portrayal of Venis’s deepfake engine spotlights a chilling monopoly on truth, where doctored footage can topple governments as easily as code deploys an app. When the quartet muses about staging coups or “buying” nations like game pieces, it mirrors real-world fears of unchecked tech power—echoes of debates around social media’s role in elections and misinformation.

By seating only men around that poker table, Armstrong traps them in a relentless echo chamber. Their rules—“No Deals, No Meals, No High Heels”—feel borrowed from frat-house absurdity and underscore how male competitiveness propels every move. The narrative engine clicks forward on one-upmanship: each brag, each financial taunt, becomes another rivet in a structure built on bravado rather than substance.

The clash between Venis’s chaos-inducing algorithm and Jeff’s fact-checking “bullshit detector” raises questions about the ethics of moderation. Is censoring harmful content an act of corporate benevolence or just another revenue stream? This tension drives the plot like the best techno-thrillers, recalling films such as Ex Machina, where artificial intelligence serves as both marvel and menace.

Armstrong peppers dialogue with nihilistic mantras—“Nothing means anything—and everything’s funny”—underscoring a worldview where human lives register as collateral in profit forecasts. Their disdain for regulation, summed up in talk of “coup out” strategies, mirrors contemporary anxieties over depoliticized elites operating above the law.

Unlike antiheroes who win us over with a spark of empathy, these protagonists remain unrepentant. By denying audience alignment, the film forces us to sit with discomfort, much as Parasite held a mirror to class horror without offering a sugarcoated escape. This deliberate coldness sharpens the satire, asking viewers not to cheer for any of these overlords.

Lines Forged in Silicon: Dialogue as Power Play

Jesse Armstrong’s script crackles with weapons-grade zingers, firing off quips at a rate that’d make Tarantino nod in approval. In the span of a single scene, you’ll hear lines like, “Your interior designer is Ayn Bland…?” immediately followed by, “Well, you only buy a paedophile lair once!” The density and speed of these punchlines propel the narrative forward, much like the rapid-fire exchanges in The Social Network, but with a darker edge.

Armstrong masterfully balances satire and farce, swinging from razor-sharp social commentary to grotesque absurdity. One moment, the tech bros debate seizing nation-states; the next, they’re trading cocky banter as explosions flash on wall-mounted screens. That tension—banter undercutting the horror of global collapse—recalls the deliciously uneasy laughs in Dr. Strangelove, where levity amplifies the stakes.

Structural rules heighten the ritualistic nature of their interactions. The poker weekend’s ironclad code—“No Deals, No Meals, No High Heels”—turns the gathering into a microcosm of corporate formalism. Even in isolation, every sip of whiskey and shuffle of cards mirrors boardroom power games, reinforcing how these rituals mask moral vacuums.

The humor tone swings between icy detachment and sudden eruptions of rage. Cory Michael Smith’s Venis delivers philosophical barbs—citations of Nietzsche and Kant tossed off like party invitations—while Steve Carell’s Randall unleashes quiet fury when his mortality is mocked. That blend of aloof cool and raw emotion creates a tonal depth few mainstream comedies attempt, offering both intellectual bait and genuine unpredictability.

Crafting Tension Through Technique

Armstrong employs static wide shots in those opulent lodge interiors, letting the grand architecture breathe as if it’s conspiring with his characters. Each tableau captures the echoing emptiness around Venis and his cohorts, until tighter close-ups in moments like Hugo’s tap outage or Randall’s hushed phone call about his diagnosis draw us into personal panic.

Editor Nick Emerson stitches together rapid cross-cuts between the alpine isolation and breaking news bulletins, creating a heartbeat of anxiety. When the quartet retreats to the underground bunker, the pacing deliberately slows—longer takes and measured transitions give the satirical claustrophobia room to widen.

Sound designer Daniel Pemberton and composer Nicholas Britell favor restraint: sparse musical cues open space for those razor-sharp lines, while every phone ping or chyron graphic registers as part of the diegetic score. It’s similar to how Gravity used minimal soundtrack to heighten cosmic isolation, yet here it amplifies human detachment.

Clocking in under two hours, the film’s runtime mirrors a chamber play’s discipline. Plot strands accelerate during the water crisis—emergency alerts flood the screens—then stall as power dynamics shift at the poker table. This lean structure keeps the satire taut, ensuring no moment of bravado goes unchecked.

Mountainhead premiered on HBO and Max on May 31, 2025.

Full Credits

Director: Jesse Armstrong

Writer: Jesse Armstrong

Producers: Jesse Armstrong

Executive Producers: Jesse Armstrong, Frank Rich, Lucy Prebble, Jon Brown, Tony Roche, Will Tracy, Mark Mylod, Jill Footlick

Cast: Steve Carell (Randall), Jason Schwartzman (Hugo “Souper” Van Yalk), Cory Michael Smith (Venis), Ramy Youssef (Jeff), Hadley Robinson (Hester), Andy Daly (Casper), Ali Kinkade (Berry), Daniel Oreskes (Dr. Phipps), David W. Thompson (Leo), Amie MacKenzie (Janine), Ava Kostia (Paula)

Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Marcel Zyskind

Production Designer: Stephen H. Carter

Costume Designer: Susan Lyall

Casting Director: Francine Maisler

Composer: Nicholas Britell