{"id":897143,"date":"2026-09-15T22:26:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T22:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/897143\/"},"modified":"2026-09-15T22:26:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T22:26:09","slug":"salvation-review-a-pin-sharp-portrait-of-a-life-coach-in-freefall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/897143\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Salvation’ Review: A Pin-Sharp Portrait of a Life Coach in Freefall"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOur first impression of Danny Carlton, the callow protagonist of \u201cSalvation<\/a>,\u201d is that he doesn\u2019t look like a man you\u2019d trust with your life. He\u2019s young, but that\u2019s not the issue. It\u2019s more the palpable air of uncertainty around him, evident in his shallow, darting gaze, his chummy but hesitant speech, his slightly gormless affect; he seems a nice enough lad, eager and solidly gym-built, but you wouldn\u2019t readily hand him any greater responsibility than mowing your lawn. Appearances, of course, can be deceiving, but the great, growing sadness of Tom Nicoll<\/a>\u2018s remarkable character study is that, in this case, they\u2019re not. Danny is going nowhere, and just about everyone but him seems to know it, including his mentor and peers on the cockamamie life-coaching course that he thinks will finally make something of him.<\/p>\n

\n\tA quietly assured and impressive debut for Scottish writer-director Nicoll, \u201cSalvation\u201d is a timely work, in conversation with much recent discourse about the toxic pressures \u2014 social, physical and psychological \u2014 placed on GenZ men living heavily online. But the film doesn\u2019t feel opportunistically ripped from the headlines. Danny, played with spiraling panic and desperately contrived machismo by a superb Liam Harkins<\/a>, is a perceptively drawn, tragically human character rather than a representative construct of his time and age. And while his story says much about modern manosphere dynamics, it\u2019s also heavily informed by more constant concerns of British class, gender and geographical difference. <\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s much thematic weight here, but balanced throughout with tension and humor \u2014 beginning with the all-too-real absurdism of the training retreat where we first meet Danny, and where self-styled life coach Marshall Allison (Kevin O\u2019Loughlin) is fleecing young men for thousands of pounds with the promise that they\u2019ll follow in his footsteps. There\u2019s much jargon-y talk of unlocking freedom and earning potential, repeated with dead-eyed belief by Marshall\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9s, some with more persuasive swagger than others. Danny is one of the unpersuasive ones, in part because he seems too honest for all this. \u201cIt\u2019s not all about the money,\u201d he argues, when Marshall critiques his salesmanship, only to be swiftly corrected by his teacher: \u201cIt kind of is.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, at the end of the weekend, Danny gets his certificate, because everyone does \u2014 and he returns home to Greenock, a post-industrial coastal town in the Scottish lowlands, an allegedly qualified life coach. Hey, it beats working in a pub, which is what he\u2019s been doing up until now; all he needs is a bit of capital to set up his home office, build his website and secure some advertising, and once the clients come rolling in, he\u2019ll pay back the loans in no time. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut apart from Scott (Stephen McMillan), an anxious, socially awkward 22-year-old with even less of a handle on the real world than Danny, no one\u2019s really buying what he\u2019s selling. A handful of other male applicants lose interest fast; he quickly drops his lone female client when she reveals more knowledge of e-commerce than he has. It turns out that even in this dubious professional field, some fakers are faker than others: Danny has mantras and breathing exercises, but no smell of success to him. And when the loan sharks come calling, his barely-a-business plan starts crumbling in wince-inducing fashion.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Harkins\u2019 brilliantly twitchy, discomfiting performance, the terror of failure is written across Danny\u2019s smooth, blokey face; so is the woebegone recognition of said failure in just about everything he does. We can hardly miss anything that Danny feels, fears or notices: Nicoll and DP Alex Grigoras shoot much of \u201cSalvation\u201d in tight, peering closeup, made all the more confrontational by the use of cramped Academy ratio throughout. It\u2019s a formal choice that chimes with the character\u2019s routine reliance on his phone\u2019s front-facing camera to put his best face forward, whether in consultation with clients or attempting to hawk his skills on Instagram and TikTok. <\/p>\n

\n\tLife offline could yet save Danny \u2014 Kathleen McDermott gives a wonderful, hard-bitten performance as his supportive but unsentimental mom Jackie, who wearily recognizes the limits of her influence \u2014 but there\u2019s no promise in Nicoll\u2019s relentlessly screw-tightening script that he\u2019ll ever find his way there. There\u2019s always another internet grift for someone looking to save himself fast, and without any gimmicky visual intrusions, the film feels authentically tuned into the aspirational mentality and oppressive reality of contemporary social media. There\u2019s no need for of-the-moment hectoring or scare-mongering in \u201cSalvation,\u201d however; Danny\u2019s arc on its own feels enough of a cautionary tale. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Our first impression of Danny Carlton, the callow protagonist of \u201cSalvation,\u201d is that he doesn\u2019t look like a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":897144,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,310536,337,111403,310537,2559],"class_list":["post-897143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-liam-harkins","tag-movies","tag-salvation","tag-tom-nicoll","tag-toronto-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=897143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/897144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=897143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=897143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=897143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}