Paul Wright has created a moodscape of loneliness in this seriously intended, strenuously performed movie, a followup to his 2013 debut feature For Those in Peril. 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.
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.
Dylan, played by MacKay, is an intense, lonely, vulnerable guy who has found a job working in an upscale hotel restaurant. He’s doing his best, nursing a crush on co-worker Becky (Emma Naomi), but simmering like a pressure cooker with unexpressed pain. He is tormented with memories of a childhood in which he thinks he was happy for the only time in his life, hanging out with his sister Claire (played as an adult by Rosy McEwen). When he was seven years old, he says, he died for four minutes, and realised what existence was all about.
But did that really happen? Or has Dylan just imagined or misremembered it? It’s not explicitly shown in any of the analogue home-video flashbacks of his childhood with Claire. And the fact/fiction borderline is where many of Dylan’s many violent confrontations with strangers appear to take place: shoving a cop, or threatening a guy at a party with knives, things don’t seem to have any consequences. But if they are only happening in his head, then that is where the consequences are accumulating.
Dylan’s crisis moment – and the film’s best moment – arrives when the hotel’s smarmy, creepy CEO James (Emun Elliott) calls in the staff one by one for a performance-assessment interview and Dylan, though clearly uncomfortable, tries his hardest to go along with this workplace pantomime and tell the boss what he thinks he wants to hear. Dylan is however honest and the calamity of this interview actually made me (bleakly) laugh out loud. But the awful truth is that it was the wrong move; MacKay’s performance shows us how Dylan’s inability to go along with the interview is symptomatic of his estrangement from the world. This revelation starts him off on the violent road to nowhere.
In anguish, he tries to reconnect with Claire (McEwen) who is deeply concerned, but also scared and bewildered by his pointless, self-harming fetishisation of the past. She herself has grown up. She has made accommodations with what needs to be done to get along in life. Why can’t Dylan? It’s a mystery. Dylan feels the burden of manhood and the combination of sensitivity and success that is expected of young men. At one point, he yells: “I want a world where the dreamers and the freaks and the good guys win!” Fair point. But Dylan is shouting this at someone whose house he has broken into, while wearing scary goth makeup. His putative victim is entitled to think that Dylan is not one of the good guys. The irony is semi-intentional.
If Dylan is on a mission, it is perhaps not simply to recapture the past, but to force Claire to recapture it alongside him, to confirm that he is right, to provide some company in his loneliness. The film’s interestingly ambiguous and hallucinatory embrace between the siblings leaves unanswered the question of how much his mission can ever succeed.
• Mission screened at the Edinburgh film festival
