For his latest Netfix documentary, Louis Theroux travels to Marbella, Miami and New York to meet content creators operating at the extreme end of the “manosphere” – a loosely connected network of misogynistic male influencers. What he finds, “as you can imagine”, is “extremely unpleasant”, said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph.
A terrifying watch
“I like horror films,” but, as the father of two teenage boys, I was left “quivering behind the sofa” by this, said Wilson. I was “gobsmacked” by how this “regressive spiral” of masculinity is being sold through “international tech platforms that should know better”.
Among the figures Theroux meets, said John Nugent in Empire, are Myron Gaines (author of the charmingly titled tome, “Why Women Deserve Less”) and Harrison Sullivan, a 24-year-old Brit known as HSTikkyTokky, who refers to his girlfriend as his “dishwasher” and who openly professes to being “racist and homophobic”.
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Neutral tone ‘falls short’
Theroux takes a “serious approach” to these encounters but sometimes his trademark neutral tone “falls short”. There is “disgusting rhetoric” that he fails to call out and, although he is supposed to be skewering the influencers’ views, they quickly start farming him for content, asking their followers to pitch in with questions for him, and then livestreaming his responses.
In some ways, the film is “classic Theroux”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times: “he holds unpleasant truths up to the light” by adopting a “faux-naive curiosity”. But, towards the end, Sullivan’s mother asks him why, if he so disapproves of what her son is doing, he is making money by publicising it. “It’s the documentarian’s age-old dilemma but it feels particularly pertinent here, and is never quite resolved.”
