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Our first impression of Danny Carlton, the callow protagonist of “Salvation,” is that he doesn’t look like a man you’d trust with your life. He’s young, but that’s not the issue. It’s 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’t readily hand him any greater responsibility than mowing your lawn. Appearances, of course, can be deceiving, but the great, growing sadness of Tom Nicoll’s remarkable character study is that, in this case, they’re 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.
A quietly assured and impressive debut for Scottish writer-director Nicoll, “Salvation” is a timely work, in conversation with much recent discourse about the toxic pressures — social, physical and psychological — placed on GenZ men living heavily online. But the film doesn’t feel opportunistically ripped from the headlines. Danny, played with spiraling panic and desperately contrived machismo by a superb Liam Harkins, 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’s also heavily informed by more constant concerns of British class, gender and geographical difference.
There’s much thematic weight here, but balanced throughout with tension and humor — 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’Loughlin) is fleecing young men for thousands of pounds with the promise that they’ll follow in his footsteps. There’s much jargon-y talk of unlocking freedom and earning potential, repeated with dead-eyed belief by Marshall’s protégés, some with more persuasive swagger than others. Danny is one of the unpersuasive ones, in part because he seems too honest for all this. “It’s not all about the money,” he argues, when Marshall critiques his salesmanship, only to be swiftly corrected by his teacher: “It kind of is.”
Still, at the end of the weekend, Danny gets his certificate, because everyone does — 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’s 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’ll pay back the loans in no time.
But 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’s really buying what he’s 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.
In Harkins’ brilliantly twitchy, discomfiting performance, the terror of failure is written across Danny’s 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 “Salvation” in tight, peering closeup, made all the more confrontational by the use of cramped Academy ratio throughout. It’s a formal choice that chimes with the character’s routine reliance on his phone’s front-facing camera to put his best face forward, whether in consultation with clients or attempting to hawk his skills on Instagram and TikTok.
Life offline could yet save Danny — Kathleen McDermott gives a wonderful, hard-bitten performance as his supportive but unsentimental mom Jackie, who wearily recognizes the limits of her influence — but there’s no promise in Nicoll’s relentlessly screw-tightening script that he’ll ever find his way there. There’s 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’s no need for of-the-moment hectoring or scare-mongering in “Salvation,” however; Danny’s arc on its own feels enough of a cautionary tale.
