Inside the Manosphere is the new documentary from Louis Theroux. Whilst I think the hype around its release was well deserved, and the film does a lot of things right, it seems to be a victim of its own subject matter.

If you don't know anything at all about the "manosphere culture", first off well done, but secondly this is probably a very good watch. The film does a great job of breaking down the key talking points into managable chunks, and dissecting them through his interviews with some of the subculture's key figureheads.

If, like me, you've sadly been exposed to this stuff before, you're really not going to glean any new insights here. It's very much a surface level examination. That being said, as the film progresses you begin to realise that it couldn't have been anything else

What Inside the Manosphere does exceptionally well is expose these guys for how deeply insecure, shallow, and empty-headed they really are. It shows them as broken men who have taken early childhood trauma and decided that they're going to make their own emotional immaturity everyone else's problem, and it does this by simply pointing a camera at them and letting them talk.

Part of this is due to Louis' George Smiley-eqsue disarming nature. He's more than happy to appear the inoffensive, un-threatening, almost clueless observer, but is dangerous enough to cut through the facade with just the right question at just the right moment. The other part comes from the subjects themselves, and this is where I feel the film shows its limitations.

Because the subjects of his research are so vapid and shallow, we realise pretty quickly that they have very little to say, it's just the same talking points over and over again. Consequently it feels like the documentary has just as little to say, because once they've spoken about gym culture, submissive women and dominant men, Trump, and the Jews, the film turns into long stretches of Louis following them around and watching them be disgusting.

Once you realise how little there is behind the curtain, the painful truth is laid bare. It really is all about the money. It doesn't matter whether these guys really believe the bile they spout or not. It doesn't matter to them, nor does it matter to the bafflingly large entourage of female content creators who seem to orbit these guys. The producers, the models, the OnlyFans creators; if it brings in new followers, then they're happy to go on these podcasts and be ridiculed.

Throughout the film several of the men voice their suspicion of Louis, worried that he's trying to construct some kind of hit-piece against them. In the end, I think they were right, that's exactly what the film is; but Louis didn't do it, they did it to themselves.