Dir: Tom Nicoll | UK Drama 90’
A hunger for purpose and a flair for delusion animate Tom Nicoll’s assured debut, a sharp and empathetic portrait of young men adrift in a small Scottish town. Salvation is a caustic, compassionate debut — funny until it suddenly isn’t, and all the more unsettling for understanding the loneliness beneath the delusion
Writer-director Nicoll understands something many films about youthful masculinity miss: misplaced ambition is less about arrogance than hunger. That is what ultimately fuels Danny (Liam Harkins), an overly confident man in his late twenties who pursues a career as a life coach after falling under the influence of a Svengali-like figure promising riches, influence and personal transformation.
Danny has swallowed the self-help industry whole — motivational slogans, entrepreneurial swagger and all — but the road to wealth proves more treacherous than advertised. In Scotland’s post-industrial Inverclyde region, his business is failing, his debts are mounting and his grandiose plans are beginning to look less like a career than an elaborate nervous breakdown. Increasingly desperate to keep the lights on and the illusion intact, he is drawn into a series of reckless schemes.
Nicoll finds a wonderfully sour comic vein in the collision between grand ambition and grim economic reality. Danny is not simply a fraud, which would make him easy to dismiss. He genuinely believes in his own bullshit. That makes him both funnier and considerably more disturbing.
Into this precarious situation comes Scott (a marvellous Stephen McMillan), Danny’s first client, who may be even more adrift than his coach. Struggling beneath the weight of an overbearing and unkind father, Scott becomes both a project and a reflection for Danny: someone he can supposedly save, and perhaps proof that his own life has meaning.
Nicoll has a sharp eye for the language of male self-improvement culture and online influencers who promise the world while feeding delusion. Yet he never lets the film curdle into caricature at his characters’ expense. The film’s real target is larger than one misguided man: a culture that monetises insecurity, repackages failure as a failure of mindset and tells young men they should be winners, entrepreneurs and masters of their own destiny before they have worked out what they want from life.
Harkins skilfully sustains the delicate balance between pathetic, funny and frightening. Danny’s conviction is absolute, and that conviction becomes increasingly sinister as reality refuses to cooperate. We cringe at his grandiosity and self-deception while never losing sight of his sincerity, loneliness or very real need to matter to someone, including himself. That balance gives Salvation its unnerving depth.
The Scottish setting is crucial. Rather than placing Danny in the anonymous backdrop of glossy metropolitan start-up culture, Nicoll plants him in the economically battered landscape around Greenock, where the language of millionaire self-actualisation collides spectacularly with everyday reality. This is not Silicon Valley with a Scottish accent. It is a world where the promise of limitless personal reinvention feels particularly absurd — and therefore particularly seductive.
The film is darkly, awkwardly and sometimes painfully funny. Danny’s attempts to turn failure into triumph have the desperate momentum of a man running downhill with no idea where the cliff edge is. Gradually, the thriller machinery tightens around the comedy, transforming his entrepreneurial fantasy into something more dangerous.
Around Harkins and McMillan, Kathleen McDermott and Conor McCarron help keep the film anchored in recognisable human territory as Danny drifts further into his private mythology. Nicoll lays bare the impacts of extended adolescence with clarity rather than condescension, resisting the easy temptation to turn Salvation into a finger-wagging satire of influencers, toxic masculinity and internet culture.
Instead, the film is interested in the messier question of why people want to believe — and what happens when belief becomes more powerful than evidence. Its references to the atomising effect of online culture and its tendency to push people into increasingly isolated sects of belief give the comedy an unexpectedly bleak political edge.
Made in just 19 days around Greenock and Glasgow, Salvation has the appealing rough-edged energy of a filmmaker who has found a way to make a feature on his own terms. Nicoll has described the project as essentially a grassroots production, built around the idea that a good script and good actors could matter more than conventional resources.
The result is a lean, mordantly funny psychological thriller that feels both distinctly Scottish and very much of the moment. Danny wants to save everyone. The joke is that he can barely save himself.
Nicoll may have made Salvation as a film about a man desperate to become a guru. What he has produced is a promising calling card for a fresh voice in British cinema.
TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL