Steve Carell Stars In A Billionaire Satire From The Creator Of Succession
If you saw Steve Carell in the Tina Fey comedy series The Four Seasons earlier this year, you can see him in quite a different role this month with Mountainhead, a satirical dramedy film directed by Succession and Peep Show co-creator Jesse Armstrong. Co-starring Jason Schwartzman (Asteroid City), it delves into the world of tech bros and the ultra wealthy as a group of rich friends head on a trip together- with mixed results. Here’s all you need to know:
What is Mountainhead about?
Carell plays Randall, one of a group of four good friends who all share one key thing in common: they’re all wealthy. Obscenely wealthy. Each is a billionaire or close to a billionaire that’s been made so by their tech companies (what else?), they’re too rich to care about the real world and naturally highly competitive with one another. It’s obviously tempting to compare this to Succession given the director, but Mountainhead really is its own thing, a more pointed parody of billionaire culture. Everyone is an almost exaggerated caricature of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs- they’re not bothered that their AI models can create frighteningly realistic deepfakes, or social media apps that are warping people’s social lives. Randall is joined in the group in the group are Hugo (Schwartzman), Jeff (Ramy Youseff), and Venis (Cory Michael Smith), all from different tech companies but all of similar outlooks on the world.
As you might’ve guessed, it all gets very bro-y between them when they decide to go on a retreat to a luxury house somewhere in rural, mountainous Utah. Each man constantly digs into the other, and all seem detached from reality, especially since, in the background of their trip, a worldwide conflict seems to be on the verge of breaking out, which is not unrelated to the technologies they’ve profited off. For the four of them, it’s more important that they prove who’s top dog and who has the best insults. But each one has motivations and secrets that they’re keeping from the others, and soon in their isolated retreat, they begin to become untrusting and hostile. Suddenl,y they’re butting heads and plotting against each other, all as the world falls into chaos from their influence.
Who else stars and what else do we know?
The four tech bros are joined in the cast by Hadley Robinson (Little Women), Andy Daly (Unfrosted), Daniel Oreskes (A Real Pain) and David W. Thompson (Gotham). Mountainhead arrived on Sky and NOW in the UK on 1st June.
