Final Rating: 4/5
Salvation, directed by Tom Nicoll, opens on a scene of several prim and proper white blokes delivering motivational speeches to each other at a riverbank. Under the tutelage of self-help guru Marshall Allison (Kevin O’Laughlin), these men are about to become life coaches.
Every day, they’ll deliver hard-hitting TikTok truth-bombs about finding oneself and making each day count. For the especially well-spoken, the pay is great, which matters since Allison will be taking a percentage of each membership. But for Danny Carlton (Liam Harkins), it’s not about money: he really believes in helping people, and life coaching is his way to do it.
Upon returning home, Carlton starts up his coaching business. He builds a website, takes out a loan to build a studio, starts recording daily vlogs, borrows money to print merchandise, seeks out clients, and tries to recruit his roommate for more cash. As with any business, life coaching has a large financial overhead. Unlike most other businesses, few potential clients see the value of it.
Salvation follows Carlton as he grows increasingly desperate to succeed in a career for which he is unsuited. Scenes alternate between cheery vertical videos in which he talks about having been at a low point and finding his way out, and his day-to-day life in which he is clearly at a low point. He’ll give a motivational speech to Instagram, and in the next minute get into a screaming match with his boss after arriving two hours late for work. He’ll have a heart to heart with a client, and in the next scene be kicked out of his mother’s house after asking her for money.
Life coaching, as portrayed, is a hollow endeavour of casting out platitudes and slogans and hoping to catch people in a rut. The dream of the life coach is to turn basic advice into $70 amateur therapy sessions. With enough clients, that translates into being able to pay your rent by smiling and nodding for a few hours a week. In fact, with enough clients, one could even convince others to become life coaches, perhaps taking a small percentage of their fees in return for changing their lives.
Nicoll’s vision of life coaching is a messy pyramid scheme. It’s less obvious than some multi-level-marketing rackets, in that there’s no physical product. That said, it’s just as dangerous because it trades in authority. Carlton does the bidding of his mentor, Allison, and in turn passes his responsibilities on to his own mentee, Scott Hammond (Stephen McMillan).
In service of “becoming your best self,” Allison convinces Carlton to pay him monthly fees he can’t afford. Using the same excuse, Carlton convinces Hammond to move out of his parents’ house to pay him rent, which goes back to Allison. At each level, the image presented is of a cheery, charismatic young man living his best life. One that you could live, too, if only you subscribe to their coaching plan!
The cruelest ironic touch is a performative hopefulness that permeates the movie. The contrast between Carlton’s vlogs and his life stand out, as does the film’s brilliant score. Salla Luhtala’s music swells in the opening scene, evoking a graduation ceremony in which the life-coach class of 2026 is about to be set out into the world, their lives forever changed.
When Carlton records his inspirational videos and orders plants to spruce up his studio, Luhtala’s score twinkles in the background. It’s as if Carlton’s bleak reality is a distraction from his dream life. A dream that’s tantalizingly close, but just out of reach.
Salvation hits especially hard releasing in 2026. A quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, entry level jobs grow scarcer by the day. Meanwhile on social media, new millionaires are made every day – not anyone you know though. It’s never been easier to see a person go from rags to riches; it’s never been easier for that person to show you how they did it.
Of course, it’s not actually easy to make it in this new fast-paced world, we’ve just entered a golden age of influencer scams at the same time as society plummets towards a total replacement of the early workforce.
Before his turn as a life coach, Carlton is failing to hold down a kitchen job at the local pub, his mom at one point remarking that life-coaching is “the first time he’s really committed to something.” And yet that commitment ultimately lands him in deeper debt with nothing to show for it.
Salvation was seen during the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. Thank you to The PR Factory for the screener.
