Mountainhead: A Review

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Mountainhead is a 2025 satirical movie produced by Frank Rich and written by Jesse Armstrong. The film received a 29% rating on the rottentomatoes popcornmeter. This rating measures audience reaction, not critical response. For many viewers, watching the movie is not a fun experience. The four main characters are unpleasant, three of them actually despicable. All four wield enormous power and three of them have no empathy for their fellow humans.

The four characters meet at a mountain retreat owned by one, Souper. Each of the characters has an agenda for the meeting. Randall is the senior member, dean of the group and its acknowledged mentor He is facing a diagnosis of incurable cancer. This man of great power refuses to accept that he, that medicine, cannot defeat the cancer. He comes to the weekend seeking nothing less than immortality.

Venis is the richest of the four characters. He is an Elon Musk analog, a caricature that highlights the most outrageous traits of the tech mogul. He manifests Musk's recognized physical awkwardness and his tendency to be hyper-expressive.

Venis is the richest man in the world, and also controls its most powerful social media platform, Traam. Updates of Traam recently released were done without 'guardrails'. That is, information on the platform may be AI generated, is not censored, modified, or monitored. False 'news' spreads wildly. Chaos results. Governments teeter. Banks fail. Civil unrest spreads globally. Venis revels in it all. He wonders if any of it is real, and if it is real, does it matter. What he wants from the weekend is control of a program that would enhance his power. He needs to convince another character, Jeff, to become a partner so that the two programs can act cooperatively.

Jeff holds the keys to realization of Venis' ambition. His program, Bilter, has made him one of the richest men in the world.

Jeff's ambition for the weekend is to thwart Venis. Jeff is the one character who is appalled by the chaos, the loss of life and property, precipitated by release of Venis' update. He believes Venis is pathological. He attributes some of the erratic behavior to drug use.

Souper, the host of the retreat, is not only the poorest of the four, but also the weakest. He wants to get investors in his company so he can become a billionaire, as his 'friends' are. His cooperation becomes critical to realization of a plan that unfolds to kill Jeff.

Why must Jeff be killed? Because Randall wants to beat cancer, to live forever. If Jeff binds his program to Venis' there is the chance that within five years Traam will have the ability to upload human consciousness...in effect bestow immortality, though digital, on all of humanity. But forget about humanity. It will bestow immortality on Randall.

If this sounds absurd, it is. The movie is a farce based on an interpretation of reality. It is what we know today, exaggerated to the grotesque.

Is the show political? Yes! One of the four tech moguls states that he has a direct line to the White House. The response from others is that everybody has a direct line to the White House. As chaos in the world grows, Venis gets a call from the president. He does not like the message he receives so he begins to plot a coup, not only of the U.S. government, but of world governments.

The four characters go into detail about how this might be accomplished, how they are hooked into power and military systems and can control them. In a comedic (darkly comedic) scene, Souper holds a virtual conference with leaders from Argentina as he prepares to take over that country.

One aspect of the movie that also parallels reality: the hypocritical justifications for the vile actions of the four. Randall above all, he who hatches the plot to kill Jeff, engages in faux philosophical justifications. He tells Souper he is all about Kant (remember Kant's Categorical Imperative? Behave as though your actions were to become universal law). He refers to Plato, and Marcus Aurelius. Venis justifies the plan to kill Jeff by appealing to Utilitarian philosophy.

The attempt to kill Jeff is one of the least persuasive episodes in the movie. However, it does offer the opportunity for a little slapstick humor, and it also helps to highlight the fact that the four geniuses are not as smart as they believe themselves to be. In fact, in the process of trying to kill Jeff they look like idiots.

Here is a YouTube video that explains the farcical nature of the attempted murder:

Do the four kill Jeff? Does Randall come close to achieving his goal of immortality? Does Jeff destroy Venis? Does anyone get a handle on the global social unrest? Does anyone care???

For the purpose of this review it is not necessary to answer any of these questions. The movie is not about what happens, but why it happens. It's about the world as it is and how it might be, if the present were taken to extremes.

The title of the movie, Mountainhead, gives a clue as to what will follow in the rest of the film. The title is a riff on one of Ayn Rand's most well-known books, The Fountainhead. In case we miss the reference, one of the characters brings it up. To recap Rand's philosophy (simplified): Pursue your own happiness as your highest moral aim.

The Jesse Armstrong/Frank Rich team came together once before, to make the hit HBO series, Succession. That series was more of a crowd pleaser than this film is, but if the film were turned into a series it might grow on the audience as well. There is a lot of potential in these characters and in this story.

Each of the four main characters is realized brilliantly by the respective actors. Carell is surprisingly sinister, showing none of the comedic inclination that won him notice in The Office. Jason Swartzman has a talent for self deprecation, which has been evident in other movies. Here it serves him well. Ramy Jossef is new to me, but is startlingly convincing in his inappropriate response to the attempts to kill him. Finally, Cory Michael Smith as Venis is convincingly obnoxious and even comes across as a sociopath in his portrayal of an analog Elon Musk.

The writing in the film is crisp and biting. While I found the so-called 'bro-talk' abrasive, my reaction might be exaggerated by my gender and experience. I am a woman who doesn't get the 'bro' thing at all. I recognize that it is exaggerated in this film, but their lingo seems to highlight the inability of these characters to articulate feelings, and to relate socially to one another (or anyone?). The men deal with codes and computers. The human experience is not their comfort zone.

I highly recommend the movie, unless you are looking for escape, for something to take you away from every day. I need that sometimes too.

Following stats are from IMDB: