I normally love a Louis Theroux documentary. His interview style is usually brilliant: he asks a quiet question, gives someone just enough rope, and then waits while they slowly tie themselves in knots on camera. It’s awkward, patient, and oddly polite and more often than not it works.
Part of the frustration with Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere is that the usual Theroux technique doesn’t really crack this world open. The men he’s interviewing have built entire careers around being on camera. They know exactly how they look, exactly how they sound, and exactly what their audiences expect from them. The awkward pause that normally exposes people just… doesn’t work in the same way here.
The documentary follows Theroux as he meets some of the most recognisable figures in the online manosphere, including creators like Sneako and other personalities who have built huge audiences talking about masculinity, dating and gender roles. They’re the loudest voices in the space, and the film spends a lot of time sitting with them while they explain their worldview.
The problem is that we already know these men are awful.
If you’ve spent any time online in the last few years, none of this will feel particularly new. We’ve all seen the viral clips a thousand times. The same talking points, the same podcast debates, the same “hot takes” designed to go viral. It sometimes feels like the documentary is explaining this world to an audience who have never really encountered it before, while a lot of younger viewers have been watching it unfold in real time for years.
And because of that, the film ends up focusing on the wrong people.
What I kept wanting was less time with the influencers at the top and more time with the people who are actually affected by their ideas. The real harm of the manosphere doesn’t happen in podcast studios or TikTok clips it happens afterwards. It happens in relationships, in classrooms, and in the way some young men start to see women and girls. That side of the story barely appears in the documentary.
In fact, women are strangely absent from it altogether. Considering how much these influencers talk about women, it feels like a huge gap. I kept thinking the documentary might have been stronger if it had spoken to the women who date men who have fallen down these online rabbit holes, or the partners and families who suddenly find themselves dealing with someone whose views have completely shifted.
Those perspectives would have made the story feel far more real.
Ironically, some of the most interesting moments come when Theroux briefly moves away from the influencers themselves. When he talks to the young men who follow these creators, or to the mums, wives and girlfriends watching someone they love disappear into this world, the documentary suddenly becomes much more revealing. Those are the moments where you start to understand why all of this matters.
About halfway through I actually had to take a twenty-minute break because I was so angry watching it. That probably says something about how toxic some of these ideas are, but it also made me realise how much deeper the documentary could have gone.
This isn’t a bad film. Theroux is still an incredibly watchable guide through strange and uncomfortable spaces, and there are flashes of the curiosity that normally makes his documentaries so compelling. This feels like a film that only dips its toe into a subject that really needed a deep dive.
The manosphere is one of the most influential and worrying online spaces shaping young men today. Inside the Manosphere introduces the personalities at the centre of it but the bigger story, and the real consequences of these ideas, still feel like they’re waiting to be told.