𝐃 𝐗 𝐌 𝐈 𝐍 𝐈 𝐐

Mountainhead is frustrating. Not because it’s incomprehensible, but because it thinks it’s saying something important when it’s really just four rich guys name-dropping dead philosophers to one-up each other. This is what happens when a movie wants to be My Dinner with Andre but ends up being Entourage for men who took one undergrad course in critical theory.

The plot, if you can call it that, follows four tech-adjacent, crypto-libertarian pseudo-intellectuals who retreat to a lavish, isolated estate to philosophize, gamble, and stroke each other’s egos. It feels like a male, dweeby version of the White Lotus Season 3 group chat. These guys aren’t really friends. They’re a hierarchy that never stops shifting. Every scene is a small coup. Power is their currency, and money is the medium through which they remind each other who the real genius is.

Philosophy here isn’t a tool for liberation or understanding. It’s a weapon. A form of currency. Quotes from Nietzsche, Žižek, and Hannah Arendt are lobbed like grenades. They interpret Foucault as a justification for surveillance, not a critique. They love to sound like they’re dismantling capitalism while privately investing in weapons startups. It’s the Silicon Valley kind of intellectualism: all critical theory boiled down into a pitch deck.

If Silicon Valley (the show) had been written from Gavin Belson and Peter Gregory’s point of view and stripped of all humor, Mountainhead would be that, only less coherent. There’s a dying old man among them, the so-called papa bear, who we learn late in the film is riddled with cancer. Suddenly, the men’s indulgence of him, their lack of open hostility, makes sense. They’re humoring him, letting him pretend this is still his mountain. And he knows it. And they know he knows.

It’s tragic, sort of. But mostly it’s another power play. Even dying becomes part of the game.

Mountainhead tries to convince us these men are isolated, that they’ve fled society for something like truth. But the camera betrays them. Background shots reveal attendants, waitstaff, and drivers. People who carry trays and quietly disappear. These ghosts of labor are never named, never addressed. They exist to contrast the monologues of the “main four,” who speak as if they’re the last humans on Earth.

This is not an apocalypse story. It’s a circlejerk in a luxury panic room.

The threat—there is one, sort of—is vague and metaphorical. It’s barely even real. But it’s enough to shatter their illusion. The moment there’s even a hint of risk, these titans of intellect cower. They hide. They betray. The bravado vanishes. That’s the clearest statement the movie makes, whether it meant to or not. These men are frightened and pathetic. Their whole worldview collapses at the sight of something they can’t control or explain.

Jean Baudrillard once wrote that simulation replaces reality. In Mountainhead, their conversations are the simulation. They’re not engaging in philosophy. They’re cosplaying as the type of people who engage in philosophy. Their ideas have no stakes, no consequences. It’s all performance, posturing, theater. They are products of a world that rewards abstraction and punishes empathy.

Slavoj Žižek might call this ideology at its most cynical: the belief that you can play the game, acknowledge the rules are corrupt, and still feel like you’ve won something by being in on the joke. These men know they’re living in a lie. They know they’re building bunkers while pretending to meditate. They know they’ve never helped anyone but themselves. But they keep going, because money is the only truth that still has weight.

And the wager—because of course there is one—is never really about the money. It’s about the pleasure of dominance. The whole film is structured like a casino with no exit. Ideas are chips, friendship is leverage, and the house always wins.

At the end, everyone gets what they wanted. Or at least what they claimed to want. Everyone except the old man. He thinks he’s been granted his last wish. But you can tell, in the quiet of that final scene, that he knows the others were just playing along. He got no truth. No final word. Only the echo of polite condescension. They gave him dignity, but it was empty, because he could no longer afford to buy anything else.

And that’s Mountainhead. A study in cowardice disguised as enlightenment. A failed parable for men who think being difficult makes something profound. It drags, it rambles, and it thinks referencing Deleuze makes up for the lack of a soul. It doesn’t.

Sources

• Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt, 1973.
• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994.
• Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books, 1995.
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, 1989.
• Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 1989.