Picture this: a group of very rich people gather at an ostentatiously large, secluded retreat. The SUVs are black, tinted, sleek. The jets are private. The egos are large, the staff sprawling and mostly unseen, the decor both sterile and unimaginably expensive. This is the distinctive milieu of Succession, the HBO juggernaut which turned the pitiful exploits of a bunch of media mogul failsons into Shakespearean drama for four critically acclaimed seasons. It is also the now familiar aesthetic of a range of eat-the-rich satires plumbing our oligarchic times for heady ridicule, if increasingly futile insight – The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Knives Out: Glass Onion, Parasite, The White Lotus and the recent A24 disappointment Death of a Unicorn to name a few. (That’s not to mention countless mediocre shows on the foibles of the wealthy, such as this month’s The Better Sister and Sirens.)
So suffice to say, I approached Mountainhead, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong’s first post-series project about four tech billionaire friends gathering for poker as one’s AI innovation wreaks havoc on the globe, with a sense of pre-existing fatigue. The market of ultra-rich satire is, to use the logic of Armstrong’s characters, saturated. (Or, to use their language: “I would seriously rather fix sub-Saharan Africa than launch a Sweetgreen challenger in the current market.”) There’s more than a whiff of Argestes, the second-season Succession episode at a billionaire mountain retreat, to these shots of private cars pulling up to a huge chalet hugged by snowcapped peaks. And though Armstrong, who solely wrote and directed the film, continues his avoidance of easy one-to-ones, there’s more than a whiff of Elon Musk to Venis (Cory Michael Smith), an AI company CEO and the richest person in the world with a tenuous grasp on reality, a stupendous sense of nihilism and unrepentant need to assert his own virility (the landscape, he notes, is “so beautiful you can fuck it”).
