Mountainhead – a disaster movie turned inside out

by Nicu Ilie

In an age when political satire oscillates between subtlety and brutality, “Mountainhead” chooses his second path without hesitation, delivering one of the most radical dissects of contemporary power. Jesse Armstrong, on a script of his own, builds a film that works like a time bomb: vaguely funny on the surface, devastating in depth.

Because, essentially, beyond the calmness of the scenes in which four people talk and talk and talk, Mountainhead is a catastrophe movie. It’s just that the perspective differs. If the classic choice of the American film was to watch the fight for survival of 4-8 characters (and not all of them were successful in surviving), Jesse Armstrong’s film passes to the other side of the disaster. The action is in the ethereal world of those who have produced catastrophe.

Away from the comfort zone

Steve Carell is the star of the cast. He completely abandons his familiar comic register to embody Randall, a tech mogul, not very relevant, but gripped by the founder’s paranoia. The mask he wears is that of the polymat: he quotes at every step either from philosophers or statistics, or from sociological gnoses without the slightest scientific rigor: “Cheese exporting countries always pay their debts.” (It makes no sense to discuss that in reality it is not so; enough to note how completely independent events bind, through an apparent correlation, and the ritrous formula is the one that should take the place of validation.)

The splery of wisdom and scientificity quickly disappears when his direct interests enter the equation. The effect should be comical. The various quotes and data are brought up not for the argument they support, but for justifying its ever-changing attitude. His megalomania is becoming more transparent. Ambitions are becoming geopolitical. Apparently, he take entire countries under his own protection or distribute them to its friends. Moreover, it has the impression that it can determine the end of the anthropic. He has an incurable disease and he is convinced that his chance is the “posthuman”, the transfer of his mind into a digital entity. And if to rush this, humanity must be put at risk, it’s nothing.

Armstrong builds dialogues that are true pieces of orfevres: quotes from various Latins, from Foucault, Nietsche or Baudrillard are intertwined with fabricated statistics and vulgarities of the lowest kind. It is sophism in its purest and most dangerous form, disguised as fake erudition, but which hypnotizes and manipulates. Carell and the others navigate magisterially between charisma and repulsion, creating characters that fascinate and frighten.

Theatrical of Hollywood

The film works as a very, very classic play. Most of the action takes place in one space, claustrophobic, an ultramodern palace in the mountaintop. Isolated, Randall and the others, are, in fact, as regards their own illusions of grandeur. As the action flows, they react increasingly disproportionate. They’re just people who, from time to time, talk on the phone or on the chat. But they think they are similar to gods.

They have caused, out of unconsciousness, a catastrophe that they cannot stop. All I can do is minimize it. To laugh at the dead that their mistake has caused and continue to provoke them. And let them go to the crime themselves in the hope that something, something will happen in a happy way.

Isolation from the mountaintop also emphasizes their breaking from the world. They think they’re Olympians. But, in fact, their connection to reality is short-circuited precisely by this supposed Olympicism. Or not with reality – which itself is in dissolution, but with the rest of humanity.

Deep-fake and fake

Jesse Armstrong turns the paranoid elucibrations of conspiracy theories into ad-hoc prophecies: tech billionaires not only manipulate algorithms, but take over (or rather have the impression that they do it) entire countries through deep-fakes and hysteria orchestrated on social networks. AI becomes not just a tool, but a weapon of mass destruction. The reality is simply abolished. The scenario explores with surgical acuity how technology can be instrumentalized to trigger social and political chaos.

What makes “Mountainhead” really disturbing is how he refuses to offer catharsis or ransom. Armstrong does not build moral heroes or consoling resolutions – he just exposes the mechanisms of power in all their cruelty, letting the viewer face his own complicity. It is a work that disturbs not by what it looks like, but by what we recognize in it.

A necessary and inconvenient film that again confirms that Jesse Armstrong remains one of the most important screenwriters of the moment – capable of turning the anxieties of the moment into pure art into an agreeable show. For compliance (as screenwriters rarely appear on moviegoers’ radar), he is the author of a great success such as “Four Lions” and has been involved in other projects with great notoriety – “Black Mirror” or “Succession”. From each of these, the viewer will find something in the new film. As far as the director is concerned, Armstrong is on debut in the feature film, but that’s not very obvious. But what’s clear is that director Jesse Armstrong has worked hard to please the screenwriter Jesse Armstrong.

The film is available on HBO Max