Mission review – dangerous quest to mend a broken childhood

<p><strong>Edinburgh film festival<br></strong>George MacKay plays a troubled restaurant worker embarking on bleak inner and outer journeys reflecting the pressures on young men</p><p>Paul Wright has created a moodscape of loneliness in this seriously intended, strenuously performed movie, a followup to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/18/cannes-for-those-in-peril-review">his 2013 debut feature For Those in Peril</a>. As before, Wright is working with lead actor George MacKay, who here plays Dylan, a troubled restaurant worker embarking on inner and outer journeys of wretchedness, desperate to make sense of a passionately remembered past and heading for the cliff-edge. As before, I think Wright has intelligently absorbed the influence of Terrence Malick in the emphasis on non-narrative ideas of mood and moment, foregrounding fleeting images and perceptions. Wright often intersperses the action with a barrage of millisecond-clips from TV and online, migraine rushes of sensory overload showing us how the world is just somehow too much.</p><p>To be honest, Mission is flawed. Some of the action is a bit drama-school-improv; the film’s ambient poetic realism can be shapeless; and in screenwriting terms, suddenly and miraculously finding a pistol out of the blue is borderline preposterous – although on this point Wright does find a way of (almost) subverting Chekhov’s rule about what happens to a gun produced in act one. But Mission is a serious film about a serious, relevant subject: the mental health of young men.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/aug/15/mission-review-dangerous-quest-to-mend-a-broken-childhood">Continue reading...</a>