Salvation: well-crafted debut offers a glimpse into the manosphere

• Reviewed from the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival

The synopsis of Salvation sounds timely, if also a mite too tidy: an aspiring life coach pushing manospheric platitudes watches helplessly as his own existence spirals out of control. Straw men burn easily, thankfully, and Scottish director Tom Nicoll’s debut feature has more on its mind than paging Dr. Schadenfreude. 

Thirty-something Danny (Liam Harkins) isn’t trying to break the mould; he just wants somebody to give his life some contours. This means attending a training retreat run by a self-styled entrepreneur, Marshall Allison (Kevin O’Loughlin), whose Ponzi scheme involves monetising self-confidence. Marshall’s a Jordan Peterson manque repackaging clichés as archetypes and targeting insecurities via doublespeak; the group’s name, “Standing Up,” is an apt moniker for a movement aimed at dudes who suspect they may not be suitably erect.  

To paraphrase Dr. Peterson, there’s no simple Antidote to Chaos. Twelve-stepping it will get you nowhere. Nicoll isn’t really interested in Marshall or his corporate-Tyler-Durden-isms; what fascinates him is the psychology of internalised shame. Danny isn’t as gullible as he looks; he has doubts about his teacher and his methods. But he clings to them anyway, because there’s more comfort in being a true believer.  

Nicoll shows plenty of filmmaking wit in the early scenes: our first glimpse of Danny is a close-up that strategically occludes the lower half of his face, suggesting a disciple on mute – or a man who feels incomplete, take your pick. Later, after being exhorted by his fellow initiates to cross a rickety rope bridge – a bit of weekend-warrior nonsense designed to rile up the lads in between mind-numbing seminars – he’s sent back across, suspended in no man’s land, all journey and no destination.   

This latter reference to the window-to-the-wall montage in The Master (2012) may be unconscious. But Salvation is ultimately traversing similar thematic territory as Paul Thomas Anderson’s classic, prodding the off-putting but recognisably universal impulse to leverage self-control against domination. Returning home to his coastal hometown of Greenock – and ignoring the commonsensical advice of his much put-on mum, Jackie (Kathleen McDermott) – our man attempts leverage his newly minted pedagogical pedigree (i.e. a bought-and-paid-for-diploma) into a real start-up. It does not go well, partly because the program is nonsense (the tenets of self-reliance and discipline sound shaky delivered via Zoom) but also because there’s so much competition. Danny is vying for clients against a bunch of other Standing Up alumni; the marketplace of ideas, such as it is, is overcrowded. 

The only person who’s buying what Danny is selling is Scott (Stephen McMillan), a wayward Gen-Zer with bad Daddy issues and worse social skills; he’s the perfect padawan for a quasi-Jedi, except that a single client, even one with a seemingly steady supply of cash, isn’t enough to sustain an entire operation. Danny keeps spending money he doesn’t have on a business that doesn’t work, which means going in debt to some dangerous people. The introduction of an underworld element verges on cliché – we’ve seen that movie before – but Nicoll keeps these elements as restrained as everything else. The script is smart enough to keep the stakes low, and also to posit self-help and loan-sharking as two sides of the same predatory coin. The predictability of the plot is similarly self-reflexive; Danny knows what he’s getting himself into but can’t curb his own appetite for self-destruction. 

Salvation’s claustrophobic visual scheme is indebted to several decades of hardscrabble festival cinema; the shooting and cutting are strong, but for the aesthetic to work, the star must withstand the camera’s scrutiny. Harkin, with his staring eyes and slack jaw, holds his own. His final scene is a killer, suggesting that a man defined by self-delusion has come to learn his lesson – the wrong one, surely, but it’s progress all the same.