There’s a particular kind of disillusionment that doesn’t resolve itself over a weekend away. It’s the slow, grinding sensation that you’ve somehow ended up living a life you never agreed to, waiting for a purpose that refuses to arrive. Paul Wright’s Mission takes that feeling and detonates it, embarking on a week-long descent into one man’s unravelling.
George MacKay leads as Dylan, a troubled waiter who can no longer face the mundanities of everyday life. Adrift in the city and estranged from his sister Claire (Rosy McEwen), he does his best to endure his slimy boss (Emun Elliott), but simmering beneath the surface is an itch he can’t suppress. Dylan decides to quit his day job and give himself seven days to find a reason to keep living, or else. What he’s really chasing is proof that he still exists, a feeling he craves from childhood, when he died for a few minutes and glimpsed the true meaning of existence. Woven through the film are home-video-style flashbacks of Dylan as a boy with his sister, from what he remembers as the only genuinely happy period of his life.
From then on Dylan spirals through escalating acts of absurdity – a stolen monkey, a night bus stand-off, a BDSM session. The film is an attack on the senses, splicing archival footage of riots and protest with an abrasive soundtrack until past and present merge into the same anxious static. Dylan’s run-ins with strangers grow increasingly violent. He karate kicks a police officer and waves knives around a house party, and yet nothing ever catches up with him. The absence of any fallout begs the question of whether these events are actually happening, or just a version of himself he wishes was real. When Dylan attempts to reconnect with Claire, she is more frightened than moved by his obsessive grip on the past. She has made peace with the compromises of adulthood, in a way he seemingly cannot.
MacKay gives an assault of a performance. Reuniting with Wright after their joint breakout For Those in Peril, he brings the same haunted intensity but with a decade of added craft behind it. Dylan’s behaviour gets stranger as the film goes on, but it never quite allows us to write him off as simply unwell. Instead it dwells on the hollow rituals of hospitality work and a society nobody could reasonably be expected to sit still inside. Dylan’s unravelling starts to look less like an aberration and more like an honest reaction to the world around him.
Mission lands at a moment when loneliness is being talked about as an epidemic in its own right, and a generation raised on screens is openly starving for something real. Dylan’s hunger is just a much louder version of what plenty of people are quietly living with. It’s a sympathetic gamble, and not always a comfortable one. Wright asks us to keep rooting for someone we can see doing real harm, which is exactly what makes Mission so singular.