For Scottish director Paul Wright, “Mission” began with a feeling. 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. 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. What’s the limit?” Dylan’s desire to feel and to live propels him toward the anarchic. 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.
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. Dylan ultimately directs that challenge inward.
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. They’re both struggling,” 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.
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. 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.
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