The Succession creator’s new film is much less a satire than a documentary.

For the quartet of tech billionaires in Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead, concepts are so highly effective that nothing else appears actual. Holed up in a resplendent snowy retreat constructed by meditation-app developer Hugo Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), they’re glued to their telephones as the surface world is erupting into chaos, thanks in no small half to the wildfire unfold of A.I. deepfakes on the social media platform owned by the world’s richest man, Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith). Individuals in Gujarat are being burned alive after being falsely accused of desecrating non secular symbols, and Midwestern People are machine-gunning one another over minor disagreements, however for these 4 males, the widespread devastation is in some methods proof of idea that they’re as necessary as they imagine themselves to be. And moreover, these our bodies going up in flames are simply pictures on a tiny display screen, so distant they may as nicely be theoretical. As he trudges by means of the snow with Randall (Steve Carell), the enterprise capitalist who serves because the group’s self-appointed thinker king, Venis asks him, “Do you … believe in other people?”

Though Armstrong is finest often called the creator of Succession, Mountainhead, which premieres on HBO on Saturday, leans towards his origins within the acidic comedy of The Thick of It and the narcissistic grotesquerie of Peep Present. There’s no Shakespearean drama right here, only a group of delusional maniacs who additionally occur to be a few of the strongest folks on this planet. Venis’ social media platform Traam boasts 4 billion customers, and his rival Jeff (Ramy Youssef) has developed a strong A.I. known as Bilter that may separate even essentially the most subtle of digital fakes from the actual factor—he calls it “the cure for info cancer.” That expertise would are available particularly useful in a world that’s quickly devolving into chaos due to Traam’s reckless deployment of generative A.I. instruments that enable each consumer to supply their very own instantaneous pretend information. However there’s unhealthy blood between them as a result of Venis mentioned one thing disparaging about Jeff on a podcast, and moreover, the more serious issues get, the extra helpful Jeff’s expertise turns into. On their one outing from the home the place the film is about, the foursome, who name themselves the Brewsters, hike to the highest of a mountain and scrawl their web worths on their naked chests: Venis is first, adopted by Randall, then Jeff, and at last Hugo, who, at a measly $500 million, is so comparatively impoverished that the others name him “Souper,” derived from “soup kitchen.” However in the course of the gathering, Jeff’s web price vaults previous Randall’s, and the older man virtually goes feral. Positive, the numbers are solely theoretical. However theories are all they’ve.

Armstrong advised me that one supply of inspiration for Mountainhead got here from the podcasts he binged whereas researching Succession’s tech storyline, and the film has the vibe of 4 would-be alpha males preventing over the identical microphone, rattling off jargon about transhumanism and four-sigma IQs. It performs like a gonzo satire of Silicon Valley self-talk, besides that each time you pause to Google some absurd time period or one other, it seems to be actual. Like Succession’s not-quite-Murdochs, the film’s characters are all transparently impressed by precise folks: Venis, together with his pharmaceutical exuberance and lust for getting humanity “off planet,” is Elon Musk with a social media community that’s nearer in dimension to Mark Zuckerberg’s; Randall, who cites Hegel and Marcus Aurelius with out absolutely greedy their concepts, is Peter Thiel; Jeff, the A.I. whiz who has sufficient of a conscience to specific regret however not sufficient to override his aggressive drive, is sort of a mixture of the Sams Altman and Bankman-Fried. (Hugo, who retains making an attempt to insist that his cash-burning meditation enterprise is definitely a “lifestyle super-app,” might be any wannabe who’s wildly wealthy by any commonplace besides the one he’s chosen to carry himself to.) The collateral harm of Traam’s hands-off method to disinformation barely exaggerates the destruction wrought by Fb in Myanmar or WhatsApp in India, and as Musk’s impending exit from the White Home spawns a flood of leaks concerning the medication he was allegedly mainlining whereas ripping the wires out of the federal authorities, the film begins to really feel much less like Dr. Strangelove and extra like Final Week Tonight.

For all its absurdist touches, Mountainhead hits hardest—and, to not put too effective a degree on it, tougher than simply about any film launched in theaters this 12 months—when it’s extra quietly observant. The way in which Hugo casually leans in opposition to a portray in his newly furbished mansion speaks volumes concerning the tech world’s relationship to artwork, and when Randall and Jeff examine their biometric knowledge—“I’ve got a sleep score of 80”—you don’t should be advised that they’ve gamified every part of their lives, as a result of that’s the one technique to know who’s gained. (Randall doesn’t inform the others that the sickness he has been preventing has just lately been pronounced terminal, insisting as a substitute that, for him, “cancer was net-net a big positive.”) Smith, who after taking part in Chevy Chase in Saturday Evening is rapidly cornering the market on smug assholes, completely captures tech evangelists’ messianic disregard for the lives of mere people, insisting that the way in which by means of the catastrophic penalties of his deepfake generator is just to “show users as much shit as possible until everyone realizes nothing’s that fuckin’ serious.” The film feels at first like a broad-stroke caricature, however the longer you inhabit these characters’ headspace, the clearer it turns into how a lot we’re already dwelling on this planet they’ve made, besides that for us, the theories aren’t simply theories. They dream the goals, and we endure the realities.