Comparing Mountainhead and Succession is useful not just because the former film is written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, who created the latter series. The two projects feel like siblings, exploring the billionaire milieu with the same stylistic and satirical eye. This one just shifts its focus from media to tech, as if research for Lukas Matsson's arc in Succession left Armstrong with more to say.

But, much like the Roy children, the two don't feel like equals. For all its merits, I struggled to be engaged in Mountainhead, and thinking about Succession has helped me understand why. It's nothing to do with the show's greater runway – there are choices at the heart of what this movie is trying to do that hinder its ability to function as drama. Without that grounding, I'm not sure its ideas need the fictional packaging, when real tech billionaires have done a pretty good job of baring their embarrassingly warped psyches all on their own lately.

Mountainhead Has A Strong Satirical Setup

And Armstrong's Approach To Dialogue Is An Asset

We meet Mountainhead's characters as two events coincide. One is an escalating global crisis: Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the world's richest man, has just pushed through a package of AI-powered features to his social media platform. These include image and video generation tools so deceptive that they are disrupting the flow of truth and creating real-world violence in a growing number of countries. These horrors haven't deterred Venis, but they've clearly spooked his board.

The second is poker night. Venis is in a group of four ultra-rich "friends" called the Brewsters, along with Ramy Youssef's Jeff, Steve Carell's Randall, and Jason Schwartzman's Hugo. Jeff, who perhaps leans more progressive and has beef with Venis, is growing his wealth fast thanks to an especially brilliant content moderation AI. Randall, the eldest of the four and mentor/investor to Venis and Jeff, is struggling to reconcile his incurable cancer diagnosis with the ironclad belief he'll live forever. And Hugo, the "poorest" of the group, has a nickname I'd be remiss to put in writing.

His characters speak with a heavy overlay of lingo without any attempt to ease us in, partially for realism and partially to really hammer home how much it sounds like nonsense.

The Brewsters are gathering at Hugo's titular, newly built home in Utah, each with an ulterior motive. Hugo is hoping to secure a $1 billion investment in his mental health app, mostly so he can be a billionaire, too. Venis has promised Jeff will sell his company his AI, while Jeff plans to press his friend on the turmoil his product is causing. And Randall means to prod Venis, his golden boy, to hurry along the process of going post-human and ing our consciousnesses to the cloud.

Jeff mocks Hugo for having seemingly named his house after Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, and in a funny bit of detailing, the book is indeed on Hugo's bedside table – with a bookmark just a few pages in.

Already, I'm sure, the fertile ground for satire is easy to see, as is why Armstrong's approach might fit the material. His characters speak with a heavy overlay of lingo without any attempt to ease us in, partially for realism and partially to really hammer home how much it sounds like nonsense. There is a certain bite to watching these bro-y idiots talk themselves into attempting coups on freshly destabilized countries (because surely they could run things better) and then realizing they actually have the wealth and power to make it happen.

I Needed Something More From Mountainhead Than The Commentary

And The Character Drama Doesn't Deliver

But, for me, this isn't enough. If the reports are accurate, Mountainhead came together quickly – the script wasn't finished until earlier this year, and filming happened in March. A year ago, it might've felt prescient, but the filmmakers will have seen the world's richest men put their dark hearts on full display in recent months. Aside from the more comedic moments, I'm not sure what this fictional rendering showed me that real life hasn't.

So, if Mountainhead was to work for me, it had to deliver in other ways. Part of the greatness of Succession was that its drama was virtually Shakespearean. The Roys and the specifics of their lives were foreign to all but the 1%, but the familial struggle at the foundation of their characters was totally relatable. Armstrong fails to recapture that here. This is intentionally an odd collection of people, connected more by shared wealth than anything, but I never once bought them as friends. Any perversion of that bond didn't make an impact as a result.

It intrigues me that Armstrong chose material so close to Succession for his feature directorial debut.

Another notable difference is that we're alone with the Brewsters for almost the entire runtime. The actors inhabit these characters well, but they don't have the benefit of juxtaposition with normality to really put their work in context. The film attempts to have Jeff function this way for a while, and Youssef is a welcome presence in this role. But he, too, obviously belongs. As much as it makes thematic sense to have them be distant from any trace of the real world, it leaves the movie without a mooring it could've really used.

It intrigues me that Armstrong chose material so close to Succession for his feature directorial debut. I see a preference for close camerawork and extended takes, but stylistically, he doesn't take many steps to have Mountainhead stand apart. I hope to see him go further afield the next time he's in the director's chair; I'd like to have a clearer sense of who he is as a filmmaker.