The Killing Floor

Brendan Boyle considers Jesse Armstrong’s “Mountainhead.”

By Brendan BoyleJuly 14, 2025

• Film

IN 1979, THE PLAYWRIGHT and filmmaker Mike Leigh directed Who’s Who, his fifth effort for the BBC anthology series Play for Today. Befitting the socially conscious mission of the program, the teleplay sketched the lives of striving Thatcherites, revolving around a brokerage firm that employs both yuppies new to the workforce and the more senior but unimpressive Alan (Richard Kane), who collects autographs from politicians and celebrities while his lonely wife looks after a brood of cats. Departing from his usual emphasis on the lower and working classes, Leigh employed more improvisational methods to achieve his desired satirical effect. This yielded mixed results; he acknowledged to interviewer Amy Raphael in the 2008 book Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh that Who’s Who “disappears up its own arse,” its depiction of the petit bourgeois at best a rehearsal for the comic subplot in his more sophisticated 1988 feature High Hopes. While Who’s Who has its place in the Mike Leigh corpus—a body of work that investigates, alongside less scientific aims, how political economy shapes human behavior—it also suggests the limitations of his anthropologically motivated approach.

Leigh is known for his collaborative techniques, in which a script is developed from weeks of character work, improvisation, and extended rehearsals with his actors. Yet his genius for excavating insight through performance has occasionally bumped up against the deterministic influence of his class-based politics. Sometimes put in the mouths of sympathetic characters amid his many grotesques—as in the visit Phil Davis and Ruth Sheen’s characters pay to the grave of Karl Marx in High Hopes—this ethos provided a working philosophy through the drab times of Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministry, during which Leigh shared lunches with BBC colleagues and fellow travelers Alan Clarke and Ken Loach. With meager public money to make their features, this generation of film workers rebuilt a sense of identity for the struggling British cinema. It was in the context of the national industry Leigh, Clarke, and Loach had helped to rejuvenate—thanks as well to the efforts of executives such as David Rose, who produced at Play for Today before departing to run the Film on Four initiative, later Film4—that Jesse Armstrong began his own investigations of the world’s most irritating people, borrowing more than a token influence from Leigh’s example.

After attending the University of Manchester (near both Leigh’s childhood home in Salford and the Haçienda, the Factory Records nightclub depicted in 24 Hour Party People), an early interest in politics led Armstrong to a short stint working in Parliament. Before long, though, he and his partner Sam Bain had turned to television writing. In 2003, Armstrong and Bain developed for Channel 4 their first proper sitcom, Peep Show, a post-Seinfeld “show about nothing” in which flatmates Mark and Jez (comedy duo David Mitchell and Robert Webb) act as the poster children for different strains of Gen X self-absorption. Peep Show was shot with an unusual camera style that purported to show the actual POV of the main characters, at times also allowing Mark and Jez to narrate their thoughts in voice-over.

The latter device anticipated the mockumentary trend of 2000s sitcoms popularized by the original British and American versions of The Office, while the former technique contributed to the impression of narrative immediacy, as if Armstrong and Bain had departed for a safari into the depths of human selfishness and beamed their findings straight back via the tube. Shortly thereafter, Armstrong contributed to the first three series of UK political comedy The Thick of It, devised by creator Armando Iannucci in a similar mockumentary style that highlighted both the dreary indignities of political life and the mediocrity of the careerists who chose it. On the side, Armstrong was dreaming up features, including a spec script about Lee Atwater and another called The Murdochs, which imagined a family conflict at the birthday party of Keith Rupert Murdoch, or as the text abbreviated it, KRM—the man who owns the news.

The Murdochs reads, in hindsight, like a proof of concept for a proof of concept, a rehearsal for the series that launched Armstrong into the upper rank of television showrunners. The birthday party serves as pretext for KRM to pressure his children into signing over voting shares of NewsCorp to his young daughters with Wendi Deng—with Deng, the stepmother of Murdoch’s previous children, in control until they reach the age of 30. What the screenplay lacked in payoff or catharsis it made up for in its voluble dialogue, inflected with equal parts business jargon, literary reference, and extemporaneous slang. Gorging himself on financial news and CEO biographies, Armstrong had begun ventriloquizing the voice of a plutocrat class with enough education and informational privilege to couch their midwit ambitions and yawning emotional needs in memorable turns of phrase. This idiom formed the basis of Succession (2018–23), his landmark HBO drama that turned the Murdochs into the fictionalized Roy family, giving Armstrong narrative latitude to build a Shakespearean scaffold underneath his hyperliterate dialogue and to fill out the cast with dexterous, prodigious performers (the central trio of Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, and Kieran Culkin have now three Emmys, two Tonys, and an Oscar between them), making for some lightning-in-a-bottle television.

With the guidance of executive producer Mark Mylod, a veteran of both Game of Thrones and Entourage, the series honed a collaborative style that accommodated the different working methods of its performers. Picking up where the pilot’s director Adam McKay (Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The Big Short) had left off, Mylod and his stable of directors favored shooting scenes in long takes with multiple handheld cameras. This allowed the more classically trained actors to stay in the emotional momentum of a scene as on stage, while providing opportunities for improvisations and found ideas. Armstrong and his writers included “alts” in their scripts, alternate lines that actors could choose to substitute on any given take (a concept familiar from McKay’s multiple cuts of Anchorman featuring entirely different jokes), while further mandating that multiple writers would be on set at all times to handle on-the-spot discoveries and rewrites. This level of flexibility was unusual on American television, and the results, not only in electric confrontations between actors but especially in awards hardware, spoke for themselves. In a real sense, Armstrong was bringing television home to itself, using the imprimatur of the HBO platform and its resources to focus on topical drama and character work of the sort that had once been a staple of broadcast schedules on both sides of the pond, but which seemed endangered in a streaming regime focused on scale at any cost and with the historical prestige of feature film culture in its sights.

The humanity of Succession’s writing and acting served as its driving tension, Armstrong’s sympathy for 0.01-percenters in a push-pull with the series’ materialist perspective on the planet-killing culpability of the Roy/Murdoch families. The show’s recurring theme of circularity, of synergistic flywheels and closed-loop systems, concluded with the Roy heirs being thrown off the ride for good, the family company sold to an overseas tech conglomerate and their part in the drama fading to black. The penultimate episode’s funeral sequence read as a eulogy for the 20th century: an era when great evils could be personalized (if reductively) and traced to the traumatized psychologies of a few Satanic visionaries, like Logan Roy (Brian Cox), who had, in the words of his brother Ewan (James Cromwell, a committed left-wing activist in his own right) “drawn in the edges of the world.” The billionaires who would rule in the 21st would rise to power from much less accomplishment or force of will, achieving wealth through loopholes and arbitrary stock valuations at a level that removes them even further from political or corporate structures of accountability. It is in this purgatorial stratosphere that Armstrong, a certified genius (like Wile E. Coyote) of television writing, finds himself having carved out a lofty and enviable niche, a privileged perch atop a looming tower.

Mountainhead, a new teleplay written and directed by Armstrong in his directorial debut and his first produced piece post-Succession, departs from the realm of media conglomerates for a focused look at America’s tech elite, scaling up from the Roy family—whose net worths were individually estimated at less than $10 billion—to the caste of rapidly ballooning AI tycoons and crypto czars. The titular Utah retreat belongs to Hugo Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), who has invited friends and colleagues Randall (Steve Carell), Jeff (Ramy Youssef), and Venis (Cory Michael Smith) for a semiregular poker night, during which new generative AI features launched by Venis’s social media platform Traam trigger a global collapse. Partly inspired by Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (2023), the Michael Lewis book about convicted fraudster and FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (whose effective altruism ethos here provides a steady stream of comedy), the script seems heavily influenced by hundreds of hours Armstrong spent listening to Silicon Valley podcasts, mainly All-In and its hosts David O. Sacks, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Friedberg. That these individuals and character types are largely unknown to the general public indicates both the movie’s niche appeal and Armstrong’s ongoing project: to burrow deep into the insular chatter that goes on in billionaire circles and to report, like a research scientist, on his findings, with his particular method of performer-friendly comedy as his discipline.

The characters in Mountainhead refer to themselves as “Brewsters,” an apparent reference to the “dark roasts” they subject each other to over the course of their retreats together. (Armstrong’s original title was Espresso; perhaps tuned in just enough to the pop girlie zeitgeist, he went for a Randian citation instead, and the rare potential dick joke that goes unremarked upon.) Schwartzman’s Hugo, nicknamed “Souper” for “Soup Kitchen” by his peers, is the low man on the totem pole with a $521 million net worth, hawking his meditation super app Slowzo in a reference to Calacanis’s investment in Calm and his similarly deferential, ingratiating demeanor toward his All-In co-hosts. Jeff is the founder of a content-moderation AI firm called Bilter, which he wields like an instrument of moral superiority over the other Brewsters: a Sam Altman–ish figure who is in it, ostensibly, to curb the industry’s worse impulses. With a foxy silver beard, Carell’s Randall is the group’s “Papa Bear,” a venture capitalist who carries himself as a classics-reading intellectual obsessed with ancient philosophy and life extension: a clear analogue to Peter Thiel, co-founder of Sacks’s PayPal. Least known among the actors is Cory Michael Smith as Venis Parish, the richest man in the world and CEO of Traam, whose trim physique, fratty demeanor, and paranoias suggest the unholy fusion of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

In keeping with the limited time frame of a feature film, Armstrong duly provides each character with a defining trait that pathologizes his behavior. Hugo and Jeff display commonplace, venal forms of elite narcissism; Hugo is defined by his relative insecurity about his social position, unable to break into the three-comma club, while an opening scene establishes Jeff’s sexual insecurity as his partner jets off to a sex party in Cancun. Randall, obsessed with beating a cancer diagnosis, fixates on Venis’s AI as the key to uploading his consciousness permanently and escaping physical decline. As portrayed by Smith, whose rubberized good looks suggest a yassified Jim Carrey, Venis alone appears as a stew of unresolved wants whose megalomania cannot be reduced to a single factor, save for, perhaps, his new status as a father (a bizarre, disturbing interlude with his infant child builds on anecdotes about Musk’s own misadventures in parenting) or the fact of his incredible $220 billion fortune. In Who’s Who, Leigh had used children as a structuring absence; his characters belong to professional classes who deferred raising families in order to chase status and celebrity against the backdrop of disappointing financial prospects in the inflationary 1970s. In Leigh’s more successful works, these material factors served as the grounding elements for concocting high drama of the kind that Who’s Who never got around to; Armstrong’s script for Mountainhead sets itself the task of not only diagnosing various elitist types but also putting them on a collision course.

In a set visit report for Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz wrote that, despite the draw of Armstrong’s methods, the quick turnaround (the cast was only announced in March shortly before filming) meant that there wasn’t much reworking of the script once production began. Armstrong had assembled Succession writers Jon Brown, Lucy Prebble, Tony Roche, and Will Tracy (all credited as executive producers, along with fellow alumni Mylod and Frank Rich) for a weeklong room in the fall of 2024 before completing the final draft alone, and Mountainhead relies much more on the strength of its dialogue than that previous series did. The Brewsters’ chatter is densely allusive, a thicket of gags that becomes a deluge of detail and verges on white noise. Touches like the characters’ nicknames for themselves and references to a “Manibesto” that goes otherwise unexplained recall how Succession used nicknames and slang to communicate a shared history between characters in an extremely rarefied sphere. The effect in both cases is smug, alienating, and perfectly fitting for the characters, who in Succession had time to grow on the audience during a four-season run. (Audiences are divided on the film, if online ratings are any guide: 2.6 out of five on Letterboxd, 5.4 out of 10 on IMDb, 27 percent on the Rotten Tomatoes “Popcornmeter.”) In Mountainhead, as the conversation increasingly turns toward the spectacle unfolding uncomfortably on their screens, the dialogue itself becomes a form of distraction, a means to wallpaper over confrontation with the reality the Brewsters are so comfortably alienated from.

Much of the comedy in the first half arises from the swells and bursts of megalomania, as economies collapse in push alerts and opportunities for financialized takeovers arise. Randall proposes a reductive view of human history (i.e., the “Fuck! What? Cool!” principle), meaning that any cataclysm can be rationalized through its end result (call it the Schmuck Doctrine). Venis eagerly plays along, and their dialogue orbits ideas about effective altruism, a philosophy of assessing potential end results in order to maximize the impact of one’s good deeds. Championed by various tech leaders, this ethos was fatally undermined by Bankman-Fried’s embrace of its terminology, using EA as a fig leaf to justify accumulating, and later swindling, massive amounts of capital for personal gain on the pretext of some deferred future, humanity-saving action. Worried that foreign assassins have shut off their water and are positioning snipers outside the window, the Brewsters retreat to a bunker within their mountain lair and plot a coup of Argentina, Venezuela, or Cuba in “a rolling swap-out to crypto network states,” even as they continue to frame their actions as heroic, in terms of the future advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI)—an implied necessary step for the salvation of mankind. Randall’s philosophical tactics have their limits: when Venis asks him to assess the strategic limitations of China, in case they want to truly scale up their four-man assault on the world order, he trails off: “Thinky, thinky, lovely thinky.”

The emergence of a murder plot in Mountainhead’s second half—Randall, alarmed by Jeff’s suggestion of removing Venis from power, hatches a plan with the others to kill Jeff and seize control of his AI—serves both as a broad, slapstick framework for comic escalation and a carefully crafted rhetorical checkmate. When Randall says “kill Jeff,” the phrase recalls the way the language of murder was used on Succession in strict business terms; “kill Dad” meant simply cutting Logan out of the family business, a betrayal equal to patricide in the minds of the Roy children and also a way of ascribing more drama and physical gravity to mundane boardroom actions than they deserve, the Roys casting themselves in Shakespearean terms to compensate for their inferiority complexes. In Mountainhead, business deals are discussed in similarly forceful terms backgrounded by the vertically scrolling scenes of carnage on Traam. Ergo: The terminology of violence, in the film’s first half, stands in for corporate machinations that have the second-order effects of actual mass death, and in the second half circles back around to mean pushing someone off a ledge at great height. The use of language both to distance themselves from their actions and to self-aggrandize collapses into the brute reality underlying the Brewsters’ faux-sophistication. To quote Tony Wilson (as interpreted by Steve Coogan): “Have you never heard of situationism, or postmodernism? Do you know nothing about the free play of signs and signifiers?”

What the murder plot signifies for Mountainhead is, in part, a maneuver onto familiar territory. A guiding principle on Succession was to treat its tragedy and comedy as not merely interwoven but interchangeable: the saddest and most devastating material also provided some of its most enduring comedy, as exemplified in the funeral episode, where every joke is double-edged with mourning and portent. A similar strain is found in the cowardice of Mark and Jez on Peep Show, where Armstrong and Bain liked nothing better than a plot instigated by their characters behaving as selfishly as possible. As Randall, Hugo, and Venis debate the most effective way to disarm and murder Jeff, the writing comes alive in screamingly funny scenes, packed with one-liners whose absurdity belies the grimness of the staging (“He can’t cut us. He can only shave us”). Yet this same maneuver that rescues the movie from the unsteady first half settles for a configuration that effectively eliminates the distinctions between its characters. Made to represent one extreme outcome of a worldview Armstrong has set out to satirize, the actors lose any opportunity to create the kind of crackling stage energy that Succession often did. Pathology and social critique cannot create characters alone, as Leigh learned on Who’s Who; only conflict can—and in returning Mountainhead to a sitcom register, Armstrong’s experiment in feature direction both falls back on his strengths and capitulates to them.

As in The Murdochs, Armstrong’s thesis relies on a deferral of catharsis, depicting characters who are shielded from the material consequences of their actions. The plot, therefore, cannot accommodate Jeff’s actual death, reinforcing the satire: while the Brewsters may be cruel enough to contemplate bludgeoning a colleague to death for the sake of their own enrichment, their physical incompetence ultimately keeps their hands clean. The commitment to a scrupulously researched layer of realism beneath furious farce prevents Armstrong’s writing from straying too far into speculative fiction, and defeats much opportunistic criticism of his work. Endlessly curious and meticulous in his preparation, his treatment of our contemporary power brokers has yet to calcify into the kind of preachy schtick found throughout the work of Aaron Sorkin—a worst-case scenario for his career. Yet the deferral of not only catharsis but also drama in Mountainhead sacrifices the tension that made Succession such a vital yardstick of its moment. The script’s linguistic maneuvers and laser-precise jokes begin to look like a work of fine detail that declines the broader view, and a very specialized pursuit indeed.

That the film chooses as one of its final shots an extended close-up of Randall in repose suggests that, on some level, Armstrong is aware of the missed opportunities for drama with this material. Randall, by some measure the most destructive and hateful member of the ensemble, nevertheless has the greatest potential for pathos; Armstrong understands best of all the Brewsters’ pathologies the fear of death, one of his great subjects on Succession. Carell, too, has accrued the kind of gravity and pathos with age that can hold the camera in silence, even when the script has not quite done the work to suggest what goes on behind his blank, withdrawn expression. It’s an image that suggests untapped depths, a character who might have been further excavated over the course of a series. Leigh picked himself up quickly after Who’s Who and returned the next year with Grown-Ups (1980), one of his most satisfying teleplays, and one potentially rewarding path for Armstrong would be to make another Mountainhead as soon as possible. One way to think about Succession’s legacy is an imaginative lens on the movements of late capitalism that provided exhausted, disempowered viewers with a reason not to tune out; as Armstrong continues his investigations of awful people and unwelcome developments, his work obliges us to keep checking in.