{"id":1151987,"date":"2026-08-16T14:49:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T14:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1151987\/"},"modified":"2026-08-16T14:49:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-16T14:49:13","slug":"mission-review-george-mackay-in-a-fevered-mental-illness-portrait","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1151987\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Mission’ Review: George MacKay in a Fevered Mental Illness Portrait"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBack in 2013, actor George MacKay<\/a> and director Paul Wright<\/a> paired up for \u201cFor Those in Peril,\u201d an atmospheric study of youthful alienation, trauma and psychological collapse in small-town Scotland that sealed both men\u2019s place on the U.K. industry \u201cones to watch\u201d list. Since then, MacKay\u2019s career has gone from strength to strength, while Wright has made just one film in the interim \u2014 2017\u2019s archival doc \u201cArcadia.\u201d It speaks to MacKay\u2019s continued commitment to challenging British independent fare that he returns for Wright\u2019s long-awaited second narrative feature. Both his stardom and his fearless approach are assets to \u201cMission<\/a>,\u201d an atmospheric study of slightly less youthful alienation, trauma and psychological collapse that confirms the director\u2019s stylistic vigor and seriousness of purpose as a storyteller.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt doesn\u2019t necessarily advance them, however. Uncompromisingly downbeat in its portrayal of an aimless Scottish service worker searching not just for a purpose in life, but a reason to live at all, \u201cMission\u201d impresses with its abrasive intensity of mood, enforced through jagged editing rhythms and dreamily disorienting archival inserts \u2014 signalling a troubled mind plagued by intrusive thoughts. In subject, ambience and form, the new film does feel heavily bound to its maker\u2019s past work \u2014 including his BAFTA-winning 2010 short \u201cUntil the River Runs Red\u201d \u2014 minus the mythic overtones of his first feature. Wright\u2019s filmmaking remains arresting, if not altogether surprising; \u201cMission\u201d will count on MacKay\u2019s profile to attract distributor interest following its competition premiere in Edinburgh, but it\u2019s still no easy sell to audiences.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith jittery body language and an unnervingly directionless gaze, MacKay immediately conveys the anxious unrest of his character Dylan, even before his interior monologue clarifies the degree of his inner torment: \u201cWhen I was seven, I died for four minutes,\u201d he says in voiceover, alluding to a formative childhood accident. \u201cI\u2019ve spent my life wishing I could feel that way again.\u201d Certainly, Dylan appears to live more in the past than the present, an impression assisted by editors Michael Aaglund and Jen Mackie, who constantly slice through proceedings with oblique, stream-of-consciousness flashes of home-movie memory, shot on hazy, grainy video stock. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe bulk of these memories are connected to Dylan\u2019s older sister Claire, from whom he was once inseparable; played as an adult by Rosy McEwen (\u201cBlue Jean\u201d), she\u2019s now present largely as a weary, defeated voice on the other end of the phone, at a loss as to how to help her brother through another episode. It\u2019s left to the audience to infer exactly what has transpired between them, but largely through omission, Wright\u2019s script effectively articulates the burden of mental illness on family members. Dylan\u2019s friends, meanwhile, are few to none; Becky (Emma Naomi), a kindly colleague at the upmarket hotel where he works as a waiter, humors him, but it\u2019s painfully clear that their interactions mean more to him than they do to her.<\/p>\n

\n\tBecky, in fact, is the only thing getting him through a job he can\u2019t bear. At a performance review meeting with the hotel\u2019s smarmy CEO James (Emun Elliott), he finally admits that he doesn\u2019t feel like himself in the workplace, and abruptly walks \u2014 though he can\u2019t quite quit hanging around the place, missing what scant human connection he once had. After he decisively gives himself one week to find a reason to continue living, his behavior spirals into more extreme actions: stealing and freeing a monkey from the zoo, aggressively confronting strangers, participating in BDSM sex. These are depicted in varyingly surreal vignettes, to the point that it becomes hard to separate Dylan\u2019s everyday and fantasy lives; Dario Swade\u2019s fuzzily layered, industrially inflected sound design amplifies the claustrophobic confusion, as does DP Nick Cooke\u2019s nervily handheld lensing, heavy on clammy closeups.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf this all amounts to a tough sit, MacKay\u2019s natural vulnerability as a performer offers a kind of lifeline to viewers, even as Dylan\u2019s behavior grows ever more erratic and offputting: The actor, often seemingly hunched over with the sheer agony of his character\u2019s interior wounds, is easy to care about when much else here is hard to parse. Sympathetic but gutsy in his embrace of a character\u2019s unflattering damage, he\u2019s a vital, humanizing ally to Wright\u2019s abrasive style of portraiture; one hopes they collaborate again, and sooner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in 2013, actor George MacKay and director Paul Wright paired up for \u201cFor Those in Peril,\u201d an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1148885,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3935],"tags":[123512,77,285662,24345,3943,312328,16,15],"class_list":["post-1151987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-edinburgh-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-george-mackay","tag-mission","tag-movies","tag-paul-wright","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1151987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1148885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1151987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1151987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1151987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}