Scottish writer-director Tom Nicoll has world-premiered his feature debut, Salvation, in the Discovery section of the Toronto International Film Festival. A darkly comic social drama dressed up as a psychological thriller, the film probes the male-influencer ecosystem through Danny Carlton (Liam Harkins), a sincere yet deluded thirtysomething convinced that success is less a matter of opportunity than mindset.

Danny washes dishes in a pub in Greenock, a post-industrial Scottish town where professional reinvention is hardly within easy reach. After a week-long retreat run by charismatic life coach Marshall Allison (Kevin O’Loughlin), he returns believing he has found his vocation by becoming a “licensed” life coach. He turns his shared flat into a “focus space”, launches a website and pays for new furniture, taking out more short-term loans when the promised stream of clients keeps failing to materialise. Thinking of himself as an entrepreneur, Danny has in fact become another cog in Marshall’s multi-level marketing machine.

Salvation rubs shoulders with British social realism, but the director doesn’t allow it to settle fully into that tradition. Greenock’s limited employment prospects and Danny’s precarious finances establish the material conditions of his desperation. Yet the film gradually shifts towards psychological-thriller territory, following the protagonist as enthusiasm hardens into delusion and mounting debt narrows his moral field of vision.

The movie’s key complication is Scott Hammond (Stephen McMillan), a depressive, directionless 22-year-old who becomes Danny’s sole committed client. Their sessions contain an uncomfortable glimmer of legitimacy. Danny listens and seems to help Scott move beyond his inertia. Harkins preserves this ambiguity, playing Danny not as a calculating fraud, but as an instinctive improviser who continually rewrites reality to protect his purchased image of himself. However, the hierarchy between Marshall and Danny is soon reproduced between Danny and Scott. With creditors closing in and relatives refusing to subsidise him any further, Danny weaponises the younger man’s trust and resentment towards his father.

Nicoll and cinematographer Alex Grigoras embed this solipsism in a visual language that remains grounded in a naturalistic tone, even as it induces psychological discomfort. The 4:3 frame, tight compositions and long lenses keep Danny insistently central, while occasional slow-burning, creeping zooms borrow from thriller grammar as financial pressure mutates into paranoia. Darker humour emerges from the collision between Danny’s grandiose corporate vocabulary and the stubborn modesty of his circumstances. Yet the film avoids outward satire, keeping a straight face that tethers the tone closer to social drama than a cheap pillorying of hapless influencers and the manosphere.

Salvation offers a compact case study of hope being franchised under the guise of empowerment. Its sharpest insight is that self-optimisation culture converts every failure into proof that further commitment is required, driving Danny into a self-lacerating downfall where dry awkwardness steadily gives way to a desperate struggle for survival.

Salvation was produced by the UK’s Lane Films with support from Screen Scotland. Met Film Sales handles its international sales.