How do you follow up one of the greatest TV shows of all time? If you're Jesse Armstrong, creator of Succession, then the answer is elementary: you
How do you follow up one of the greatest TV shows of all time? If you’re Jesse Armstrong, creator of Succession, then the answer is elementary: you assemble a stellar cast comprising Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef, and you continue to take lacerating satirical swipes at the opulent and powerful, this time at feature length. Yes, Armstrong’s first post-Roy assignment is Mountainhead, a Sky exclusive movie in which four billionaire tech bros’ mountain retreat is disrupted by a rapidly escalating international crisis that they may or may not have helped instigate. What an absurd notion, eh? Check out the trailer below;
At once patently absurd and disturbingly plausible, Mountainhead looks set to see Armstrong’s knives out once again in a substantial way if this first teaser is anything to go by. It’s challenging not to watch this trailer, filled with talk of “racist and shitty” social media platforms, “Mount Techmore”, excitement at atrocities, and — in the words of Ramy Youssef’s Jeff — an unholy brew of “unfalsifiable deepfakes, massive fraud, and market instability” that’ve seemingly set humanity on a path to apocalypse, and not see glaring parallels between the scenario Armstrong has concocted and the very real, very precarious state of affairs in the real world right now. Thankfully at least, instead of the all too real Trumps and Musks of this world, here we’re getting Carell, Schwartzman, Smith, and Youssef on piercing form as fictitious feckless tech execs Randall, Hugo “Souper” Van Yalk, Venis, and Jeff, whose net worth is $371 billion and whose boneheaded numbskullery is utterly priceless.
Announced in January, cast and shot in March, and due to hit Sky and NOW in June, Mountainhead — which, it bears mentioning, is Jesse Armstrong’s feature directorial debut — has come together rapidly as the real world has done its darnedest to turn the film’s satire into reality before it screens. So long as there’s still a world here in a little over a month from now (*fingers crossed*) we’ll be seated and ready to watch the chaos unfold just as soon as the movie drops on 1 June.
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