Though it’s impossible to discuss one without mentioning the other, Mountainhead is not a spiritual sequel to Succession, nor a new TV epic. It’s a smaller project, written quickly over a few weeks by Jesse Armstrong — yet it’s still sharp, barbed, satirical, and laced with a kind of elegant despair in the face of contemporary power. It’s as if Armstrong needed to purge the last remnants of the Roys to make room for new monsters: tech billionaires, heirs of Silicon Valley, who speak of “curing the cancer of information” while launching deepfake tools that set the world on fire. If Succession was about the collapse of a dynasty, Mountainhead is about men who were born post-collapse, only too rich to notice.

Though not a direct continuation, Mountainhead feels like a dystopian cousin, condensing into just under two hours the same corrosive energy that made the Roy saga such a poignant portrait of power, now transposed to the chilling and current terrain of Silicon Valley moguls casually deciding the fate of the world over drinks and delusions. And their own fate, of course. But this time, it’s like being stuck for two hours with four less compelling versions of Roman Roy, without access to the trauma that once humanized their cruelty.

The action unfolds almost entirely in a luxury home in Utah, where four friends (or are they accomplices?) gather for a weekend of poker and vanity. This group — an informal fraternity known as “the Brewsters” — parades the masculine archetypes of modern power: Venis (Cory Michael Smith, excellent), a sociopathic CEO who runs Traam, a toxic, 4chan-style social network; Jeff (Ramy Youssef), the ethical yet egotistical inventor of a supposedly redemptive AI; Randall (Steve Carell), a financier in denial about his own mortality; and Hugo, nicknamed Souper (Jason Schwartzman), the “poorest” of the billionaires — with only nine digits to his name.

The film’s cold, minimalist aesthetic reflects both the characters’ physical isolation and their absolute narcissism. They see themselves as the only real inhabitants of the planet; the rest of humanity, as Venis himself puts it, are NPCs — programmable extras in a game they control. In both tone and structure, the film plays like a filmed stage piece, and it could easily have been a kind of The Shining for tech bros, mixed with the dramatic elements of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. But it isn’t.

Armstrong knows he can’t escape comparisons to Succession — and at times, he embraces them. Venis’s disdain for the tragedy he causes recalls Lukas Matsson; Souper, with his self-pitying billionaire routine, echoes Tom Wambsgans calling himself “the tallest dwarf in the world.” But where the Roys still had frayed family bonds, the Brewsters of Mountainhead have none: they’re alpha males performing friendship while competing over who has the largest fortune — literally writing their net worths on their bare chests, as trophies of flesh. And then trying to eliminate one another in the most brutal, absurd way possible.

Variety’s review pinpoints Armstrong’s real focus: not a structural analysis of power, as in Succession, but a stark exposure of the emotional and moral void in these men, “broken inside,” who seek digital immortality, deny death with transhumanist dreams, and flee from any form of accountability — like Venis, who downplays his catastrophic creation with a tweet saying “fuuck” with two U’s. This is a farce. It’s grotesque satire — and because of that, it works. Laughter comes before empathy; indictment before any attempt to explain.

The film allows for absurdities and allegories (like the orgiastic party thrown by Hester, Jeff’s absent girlfriend) without losing sight of its target: the nihilism of an elite that believes itself transcendent. There’s neither time nor intention to deepen relationships or build emotional arcs. And Armstrong seems fully aware of that: Mountainhead is a film acutely self-aware of its limits — and its acidity. The social critique is everywhere: in the jokes, in the silences, in the dehumanized jargon of people who treat genocide as a side effect of innovation.

It may not reach the emotional impact of Succession, but Mountainhead is nonetheless precise in its portrayal of postmodern power: lonely, laughable, grotesque — and perhaps for that very reason, invincible.