Is the influencer film already becoming as cliché as their catchphrases?

Cinema has barely caught up with influencer culture and yet its iconography is already familiar: motivational rhetoric, and manufactured toxic masculinity, presented alongside conspicuous success, and insecurity repackaged as aspiration. At first glance, Salvation appears to occupy familiar themes already seen this year from Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere, and so the topic is far from groundbreaking as real-world pestilence. Yet what emerges is wickedly funny, and sharply observed, precisely because Nicoll understands that the phenomenon may be recent, but the impulses beneath it are not.

Danny’s trajectory can be understood in three movements: delusion, desperation, and descent. His tragedy is not simply that he wants success but that the distance between the man he is and the man he presents to the world becomes increasingly impossible for him to acknowledge. The performance ceases to be a means to payday and becomes something visceral he needs to believe about himself. Salvation’s close-ups prove particularly effective here, repeatedly forcing us into uncomfortable proximity with the same reflection in the mirror of a man whose existence depends upon controlling how he is seen.

Remove the algorithms, branding, and influencer jargon altogether, and Salvation begins to resemble a classical tale of hubris. Danny flies too close to the sun, certainly, but ambition alone is not his undoing. It is delusion: the inability, or unwillingness, to distinguish aspiration from reality or to embrace his authentic self, albeit an authentic self forced upon him by the dead-end town he finds himself in.

The title, therefore, consequently feels significant. Influencer culture increasingly borrows the motifs of religion. Its gurus offer doctrine and ritual, gather disciples, promise transformation, and provide answers to those searching for identity and belonging. They offer, in other words, salvation, but it is a predatory kind and more in keeping with a deal-with-the-devil motif. Insecurity is simultaneously misdiagnosed and monetised, and the promise is that you might finally become rich enough, desirable enough, masculine enough, visible enough, but fulfilment must remain tantalisingly out of reach because dissatisfaction and fear keep the congregation coming back and the church plate chiming.

Against this artificial world, Scotland’s topography itself provides a striking counterpoint. The destitution and desperation of Danny’s existence sit jarringly beside the country’s natural beauty, a contrast Scottish cinema has exploited before, almost as if Nicoll’s is showing the audience the natural beauty and success surrounding Danny, but which he is too blind to see, being, as he is, so preoccupied by his artificial construct. The landscape here then also represents something that Danny’s digital existence cannot manipulate: a physical reality entirely indifferent and unwavering in his performance. The aerial panning shots suggest further new-religion motifs as we imagine a celestial being watching over Danny’s descent.

I was reminded of Sai Karan Talwar’s I Am the Prize, which I encountered at HollyShorts this year, in which Russell Tovey plays a hypermasculine self-help influencer whose public identity conceals a profoundly denied private self. The circumstances are different, but the films share an anxiety about what happens when performance stops being something we do and becomes something we believe as a core component of our identity. When the debt accumulates and the followers leave, it is only natural then for them to lash out as they fight to protect the very essence of who they are.

Perhaps the ‘downfall of the influencer’ film is already becoming, if not fully arrived, cliché, but Salvation survives that danger because it understands that the influencer is merely contemporary packaging for an ancient human weakness: our capacity to mistake the person we perform for the person we are.