I have been a fan of Louis Theroux for a long time, and of his brother as well. Since his early documentaries, he has had a rare way of working: friendly, almost naïve in appearance, yet remarkably persistent. He asks questions that sound simple, but are often difficult to avoid answering.

So when his new documentary about the so-called manosphere appeared, my curiosity was immediately triggered. The online world of self-proclaimed male influencers, alpha coaches and podcast millionaires has grown into a powerful ecosystem in recent years. Figures such as Andrew Tate have millions of followers, and their ideas increasingly filter down to younger audiences. In the documentary, the number of young men approaching their idols, both online and offline, is almost impossible to count.

What Theroux shows is, in many ways, unsettling, but at the same time, often less surprising if you have been following this phenomenon for a while.

One recurring mechanism is the business model. As investigative programmes such as the Dutch YouTube show BOOS have previously shown, part of the economy around these influencers revolves around questionable investment advice, paid Telegram groups and courses promising financial success. The formula is by now familiar: create an aura of success, show a few luxury cars, and then sell access to the “strategy”.

What struck me even more in the documentary was how everyone seems to be using everyone else. Some female guests appear on openly misogynistic podcasts because it increases their reach. The male hosts, in turn, use these confrontations to generate clicks, followers and income. The entire ecosystem seems to run on visibility, conflict and algorithmic amplification.

At one point, the mother of one of the main characters makes a remark that stayed with me. She notes that Theroux himself is also using her son to make money through a Netflix documentary. To Theroux’s credit, he leaves that moment in the film. It is an uncomfortable observation, but also an honest one. And of course she has a point.

Documentaries are never completely neutral. They are also a form of storytelling, of selection and editing. Even when a filmmaker visibly tries to be fair, the end result is still a product designed to be watched.

One element of the documentary I personally struggled with was the tendency to psychologise the phenomenon. Several times, Theroux suggests that the men in this world behave the way they do because of broken childhoods or difficult family backgrounds. Perhaps that is true for some of them. Perhaps not. The problem with this type of explanation is that it is often too simple for a phenomenon that is much more complex. Human behaviour rarely reduces neatly to a single psychological cause.

Other factors are clearly at play: economic incentives, algorithms that reward extreme content, an online culture where provocation translates directly into reach, and an audience that seems highly responsive to it. When millions of views can be generated with increasingly provocative statements, the incentive to push things further becomes obvious.

That makes the phenomenon perhaps less psychological and more structural. And more difficult to deal with.

What I was left wondering about afterwards was a striking claim made by one of the influencers. He suggested that they themselves had pushed the world a little further to the political right.

Theroux’s documentary, therefore, remains interesting, but perhaps primarily as an observation rather than as an explanation. Which, in fairness, has always been Theroux’s strength: watching, asking questions and letting the audience think about what they see.

And in the final moments of the documentary, something slightly more human appears as well. At a fairground game, Theroux himself cannot resist giving a boxing machine a try, and he manages to score surprisingly high.