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For Scottish director Paul Wright, “Mission” began with a feeling.
“For the first time with a film I’ve made, it was kind of tapping into a feeling,” he tells Variety. “More so than plot or story, it was just that feeling that some
of us get sometimes of feeling maybe disconnected from the world and feeling you need more. You need something more.”
Starring George MacKay as Dylan, an alienated man who pushes himself toward increasingly extreme experiences in a bid to evade death, “Mission” will have its world premiere in competition at Edinburgh Intl. Film Festival. Rosy McEwen co-stars as his estranged sister Claire.
The film is backed by BBC Film, Screen Scotland and Ffilm Cymru Wales with National Lottery funding. A co-production between Early Day Films and 65 Wilding Films, it was developed with Screen Scotland and BBC Film. Producers are Kate Byers, Linn Waite, Alex Thiele, Marie-Elena Dyche and Lowri Roberts, while Blue Finch Films handles worldwide sales.
For Wright, Dylan’s increasingly dangerous behavior grew out of a romantic ideal: the desire for an “all or nothing” existence.
“There’s that contrast of what he’s feeling and this desire for sensation, and I think within that it can slide from light to dark quite simply,” Wright says. “Where do you stop? What’s the limit?”
Dylan’s desire to feel and to live propels him toward the anarchic.
“In this kind of uber-capitalist world we live in, we’ve all fallen into certain patterns that, for a lot of people, aren’t fulfilling,” Wright says.
As traditional religion has declined and work, money and capitalism have occupied more of that space, Wright became interested in a culture of “just surviving, just getting by.”
“How do you feel something when you’ve been kind of numbed to the modern world?”
The film pushes Dylan toward what Wright calls the “thin line between transcendence and transgression.”
“It becomes a kind of epic within one character: all or nothing, heaven or hell,” he says. “How far do you go, and where do you stop, when your goal is a feeling?”
Music, movement and Dylan’s body take on an almost ritualistic function as he searches for sensation.
“It is tapping into trying to reach a level of ecstasy or rapture,” Wright says. “That primal energy maybe a lot of us have moved away from.”
That impulse has roots beyond cinema. Wright drew inspiration from performance artists including Chris Burden and Marina Abramović, as well as Dadaism and the alternative music he discovered while growing up in a small village in Fife.
Encountering work outside the mainstream could feel “almost like a religious experience,” he recalls.
“Oh my God, that really connects with me in a way that nothing has before,” Wright says. “It became this almost obsession to seek out this alternative culture.”
He sees outsider figures such as radical performance artists as “modern-day shamans,” willing to disturb accepted patterns in the hope of revealing another way of living.
“Sometimes it can become uncomfortable when someone rubs up against that, or challenges that,” he says.
Dylan ultimately directs that challenge inward.
“He feels he has to go as far as he possibly can to complete his own journey,” Wright says. “It’s about that challenge of the self and going into his own darkness.”
But “Mission” also gives Dylan an emotional tether in Claire. McEwen, who broke out in “Blue Jean,” plays the estranged sister whose presence reconnects him with childhood and an earlier sense of possibility, before the constraints of adulthood began to close in.
“There was a simplicity in the world,” Wright says. “It felt anything was possible at that stage, compared to the modern world kind of beating them down over the years.”
Claire grew in importance during the making of the film, becoming both a counterpoint to Dylan and its emotional anchor.
“They’re both the same side in some ways. They’re both struggling,” Wright says. “There are things we all need, connection and meaning.”
“Mission” reunites Wright and MacKay more than a decade after “For Those in Peril,” Wright’s feature debut, which premiered in Cannes Critics’ Week.
“Obviously I knew what George would give us, that he would give us his all,” Wright says.
Wright’s 2017 archive documentary “Arcadia” also shaped his approach to “Mission,” reinforcing his conviction about what cinema can do beyond conventional storytelling.
“I do see film as a sensory medium, and this idea of trying to create emotions through images and sounds excites me more than anything in cinema,” he says.
“It’s not about A to B to C plot progression.”
Instead, “Mission” moves vertically into Dylan’s psyche, where memory, dreams, fear, imagination and reality begin to merge.
“They become these different streams of consciousness within a single character,” Wright says. “Maybe not discerning too much on which is which. It becomes this quite immersive experience, hopefully, for the viewer.”
Shot in and around Glasgow in 2024, the film also gave Wright the opportunity to foreground the city as a specifically Scottish setting.
“It has a character of its own. Its own personality,” he says.
After a lengthy gap between narrative features, Wright is now developing several projects, and wants to push the instincts behind “Mission” even further.
“There’s something that I’m trying to explore in film,” he says. “How far can I push things to get to the things that I’m most interested in exploring?”
He is aware that this work is not conventional. For Wright, that is part of its value.
“Sometimes it is that stuff that is one step outside,” he says. “My hope is that the people that do connect with it really connect with it.”
