Paul Wright’s debut feature For Those in Peril arrived at Cannes in 2013 and promptly bewildered it. A fractured, formally restless portrait of grief and survivor’s guilt set in a Scottish fishing community, it announced a filmmaker with little interest in comfort or convention, and launched George MacKay’s career in the process. Thirteen years on, Wright and MacKay have reunited for Mission, and if anything, Wright has become less interested in making things easy.
Dylan is a young Glaswegian running on fumes. His job in a hotel restaurant is meaningless, his existence largely friendless, his connection to the world around him fraying at every edge. When he gives himself a week to find a reason to keep going — structured not as dramatic device but as a kind of private, desperate experiment — what follows is less a plot than a series of escalating attempts to feel something real. He breaks a monkey out of a zoo. He attacks a police officer. He pushes himself and the people around him toward increasingly extreme edges, testing the limits of a world that seems to have stopped registering his presence entirely.
Wright’s method is as fractured as his protagonist’s mental state. The film splices MacKay’s performance with Adam Curtis-style documentary montages, fragments of home movie footage, bursts of sensory overload drawn from the relentless visual noise of screens and social media — the world as it feels when your nervous system is already overwhelmed. It’s a formally bold approach and, for the most part, it works. Wright isn’t illustrating Dylan’s breakdown so much as replicating its texture, pulling the viewer into a disorientation that feels earned rather than imposed.
What holds it together is MacKay, who is extraordinary. This is a physically and psychologically demanding performance — raw, unglamorous and entirely committed — and he anchors material that might otherwise dissolve into abstraction. Rosy McEwen, as Dylan’s estranged sister Claire, brings warmth and specificity to a role that could easily have remained peripheral, and the scenes between them carry the film’s most honest emotional weight.
Where Mission occasionally loses its footing is in its more improvised passages. Wright reportedly worked without a conventional script, building the film from a visual look-book and a series of situations, and the freedom this gives the performances sometimes tips into shapelessness. A few sequences feel unresolved in ways that don’t quite read as intentional ambiguity, and the film’s climactic turns stretch credibility in ways that undercut the grounded anguish of what surrounds them.
Nevertheless, Wright is operating in a space very few British filmmakers have — films that treat alienation and mental distress not as issues to be resolved, but as textures to be inhabited, making Mission genuinely difficult, genuinely odd, and genuinely alive.
