On demand: "Mountainhead"

Shot since the turn of the year, here is the writer-director Jesse Armstrong's rapid response to real-world developments in 2025 - and rapid responses may be the only viable game in town now, given the frantic accelerationism our techbro overlords are presently engineering. In other key respects, however, this is what Armstrong has been working towards for several years. Much as his sometime mentor Armando Iannucci's feature debut, 2009's In the Loop, played like a spiritual spin-off of its maker's TV hit The Thick of It, the made-for-HBO Mountainhead could easily be mistaken for a feature-length episode of Armstrong's HBO sensation Succession. Four self-described "disruptors" (for which, as ever, we must read: wankers) hole up in a modernist ski lodge only a technocrat could afford. Jason Schwartzmann's Souper, the brains behind a burgeoning wellness app, is the venue's de facto owner, though as a mere millionaire, he's chiefly using the occasion to suck up to his billionaire alpha-dog guests. These latter are: Steve Carell's Randall, cloaking his evil genius in book learning yet rattled by a terminal diagnosis that challenges his perception of his body as a machine; Ramy Youssef's Jeff, the conscience of the four (a relative term), perturbed by his other half's revelation that she'll be spending the same weekend at a sex party in Mexico; and Cory Michael Smith's Vanis, the blanched Elon of this group, horny for AI, odd in his habits, weird around his own children. They have much to discuss. As multitudinous screens bear out, their collective tech has just unleashed and amplified an especially deadly wave of fake news, fostering rage, violence and general instability out there beyond this bubble, which is of course to say down here, in the foothills of reality.

One of the reasons this response has been so rapid is that this project never feels anything other than manageable: it's four men in a handsomely catered room, with the setting and dialogue doing all of the heavy lifting. If any spectre looms over this notional TV feast, it isn't Succession per se, rather the "special" episode of The West Wing Aaron Sorkin bashed out in response to 9/11, where the medium mattered less than the message. Still, for all its myriad failings, that project was at least trying to rally the viewing public. It's not long before Mountainhead runs facefirst into the same issue that befell Succession (and, indeed, HBO's other era-defining show The White Lotus): it means to leave us in the company of irredeemably terrible human beings, absolute disasters, complete weapons. Once again, Armstrong has nailed how these people talk: a mix of obfuscating jargon, dorky dadjokes, 4Chan-level razzing and mutual egging-on. It's doubtless accurate as portraiture, and these most capable of actors reliably hit the comic beats (I particularly savoured Carell's "I take Kant really fucking seriously"). Yet beyond the thirty minutes of the average Succession episode, it's more exhausting than revealing, and only ever debatably funny; the question will be whether at this stage you feel inclined to laugh, given what men like these will be doing to the social fabric over the course of these 105 minutes. For manageable, we might also read limited: four actors and a script is really all Mountainhead has by way of effects - it's a table reading being sold to us as a TV event - which is why you sense it collapsing in on itself from around the midpoint. Greater ramping-up was evident in those turn-of-the-millennium cable redos of Fail-Safe and 12 Angry Men; anyone led by this backdrop to anticipate some sort of force majeure may end up disappointed by a work so naggingly... well, mineure. Maybe you're just sitting down in the hope of seeing these characters get what they deserve, but you'll have to sit through a lot of jawing to get to that, and I'm not sure Armstrong's conclusion even delivers on that front. It's going to require something a good deal more forceful than windy satire to bring these fuckers down; the moment has very much not been met (again).

Mountainhead is now streaming on NOW.