Avis Metacritic

While Manodrome doesn't always manage to keep steady pacing, it still serves as a unique character study for Jesse Eisenberg's angry and destructive young man.

While John Trengrove’s skill is apparent in the slow build of tension, it also stands out in the arguably more impressive way that he holds Ralphie’s view of the world separate from that of the film’s.

The subcultures in Manodrome are ostensibly a work of fiction but, exaggerated as they may be, are no less plausible or rife with intrigue.

It's Eisenberg who finds Ralphie in those narrative spaces, creating a whole and crushingly convincing portrait of a profoundly lost man, and the damage left in his wake.

If the script plunges into the frustrating waters of predictability, Manodrome finds some solace in the asserted cast.

What Ralphie goes through over the course of this absorbing enough but bludgeoning portrait of corrosive masculinity makes him both victim and monster.

Eisenberg impresses in a role which requires him to keep a great deal beneath the surface. But the screenplay locks up some elements of his character rather too tight and, as dramatic motivations for what follows, they are unpersuasive and somewhat cliched.

The callbacks to “Taxi Driver” and, on a lesser level, “Fight Club” are many in South African writer-director John Trengrove’s well-shot but heavy-handed and depressingly obvious Manodrome, a blunt indictment of toxic masculinity that strikes mere glancing blows and packs a relatively soft punch.

The characters feel thin, the secret society seems implausible and its goals too vague to capture the imagination. “Manodrome” taps into a deep unease at play in the wider world, but it presents only the shell of an idea, focusing on a not-terribly-interesting character with only the haziest of goals.

Crude and sensationalizing, Manodrome is like an amalgam of all the headlines you’ve read about the kinds of men who succumb to warped ideologies.