Mountainhead wants to bite, but ends up gumming its audience.

Jesse Armstrong’s satire of tech titans marooned in a snowbound mansion arrives with all the right ingredients: a sharp-witted script, a killer cast, and a premise ripped from the headlines. But somehow, the thing never quite cooks.

Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith), the jittery creator of the misinformation-spewing social platform Traam, holes up with fellow billionaires Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef), Hugo “Souper” Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), and Randall Garrett (Steve Carell) as society crumbles outside. The setup promises dark laughs and savage skewering.

It delivers some.

Armstrong’s dialogue crackles early. The actors land their lines with deadpan precision, and there are stretches where the film hums with the energy of Succession at its best. You sense what Mountainhead could’ve been.

But the characters drift toward cartoon. Their odd behavior, intended as a critique of tech-world narcissism, too often strains believability. Schwartzman’s Van Yalk, in particular, feels plucked from a different movie entirely—his manic energy clashing with the film’s cooler tone.

The story, too, loses its grip. What starts as a tight chamber piece begins to fray in the second half, collapsing into broad farce. The satire gets blunt. The tension leaks away.

Visually, the film does little to compensate. The single setting grows stale. By the final scenes, even the actors seem boxed in.

Which is a shame, because buried here is a sharper movie—one that skewers tech arrogance without slipping into caricature, one that sustains its bite from first frame to last.

As it stands, Mountainhead wobbles. Not a disaster. Not a triumph. Just another would-be satire stuck halfway up the hill.