Mission: Long awaited return by Paul Wright brings renewed sense of hope in the possibilities for Scottish cinema

4 Stars

Mission is the long-anticipated return to narrative filmmaking from writer-director Paul Wright, whose 2013 debut For Those in Peril provided George MacKay with one of his first substantial roles. 13 years later Wright and MacKay have reunited for Mission, which received its world premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival in competition for the Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence.

MacKay plays Dylan, who we first encounter via VHS-style footage of his younger self. Dylan tells us via voiceover that he died for four minutes when he was seven years old, and has spent his whole life wishing he could experience the world the way he did during those four minutes. Now a waiter in a swanky hotel restaurant, Dylan is living his life on autopilot. He maintains threadbare relationships with his sister Claire (Blue Jean’s Rosy McEwen) and colleague Becky (Bridgerton’s Emma Naomi) and serves customers with a glazed look in his eyes.

A work performance review with smarmy CEO James (The Incomer’s Emun Elliott) is the catalyst for Dylan’s unravelling. Dylan’s refusal to lie about liking his job recalls the interview scene from last year’s On Falling, where a question about what Joana Santos’ Aurora enjoys doing outside of work provokes an existential crisis.

Aurora and Dylan are two characters whose depersonalisation leaves them completely estranged from the emotional labour they’re expected to perform as workers, but where Aurora internalises her alienation, Dylan externalises his. Walking out on his job, Dylan sets himself a limit of one week to recapture the transcendence he experienced as a seven-year-old, embarking on an escalating series of transgressions.

In our interview with Wright, the director spoke about how he encouraged improvisation on set ‘to create space where moments and images can happen.’ MacKay absolutely thrives in this environment: his performance is sinewy and sweaty, with a thousand-yard stare that bores beyond the lens. It’s the polar opposite from his turn in Mark Jenkin’s recent Rose of Nevada.

Jenkin, who films on a Bolex camera that can only run for 30 seconds at a time, ties his creativity to that limitation. Wright embraces the other end of the spectrum, telling SNACK that they would just go wandering for an hour and see what happened. This approach allows MacKay to deliver one of his most intuitive and free-wheeling performances yet, and it’s testament to his versatility as an actor that he’s so compelling to watch working under either dictum. Cinematographer Nick Cooke’s handheld camera and composer Roly Porter’s discordant industrial score both convey Dylan’s increasing instability. 

The impact of some of the techniques Wright incorporates, such as the voiceover, the VHS-style footage, and temporal slippages, is diluted by their proliferation not just across Mission’s fellow EIFF competition titles (Skintown, Pretty Babies, The State of Us), but in other recent fare like Blue Heron. But elsewhere Wright’s confidence in and command of cinema as a sensory medium puts him in a league of his own.

Large parts of the film defy narrative convention, with extended kaleidoscopic bursts of light and sound providing expressionistic forays into Dylan’s fractured state of mind. These tonal and textural achievements make the film’s overuse of voiceover all the more puzzling: Mackay and Wright are both clearly capable of showing rather than telling, so the at-times overwrought exposition feels like a waste of the film’s formal potential.

After years of Glasgow being trussed up to resemble Gotham, New York City, and Philadelphia for US franchise films, it’s a sheer relief to see a recognisably down-to-earth Glasgow and its landmarks on screen, from the Clyde Tunnel to the Beresford Hotel to our humble Subway carriage. There’s a pleasingly cinematic use of the SECC tunnel and even a cameo from the dancing cats at St Enoch’s, who we doubt we’ll be seeing in The Batman’s upcoming sequel.

Elsewhere at EIFF we were delighted to take in the Our Cinema 26 programme, a trio of shorts made by 18 Edinburgh teenagers who were mentored through the process by the likes of Scott Graham and Duncan Cowles. What struck us about the teenagers’ work was how they gravitated towards the abstract and the unsaid, particularly on The Last Whisper which rattled with a malevolent energy. There’s something to be said for how the institutionalisation of filmmaking can see these instincts sacrificed at the altar of more conservative storytelling devices.

Between those teenagers’ DIY efforts and Wright’s Mission we feel a renewed sense of hope in the possibilities for Scottish cinema, for a resurgence of experimentation in a country whose national cinema too often errs on the side of narrative and aesthetic caution. We also hope we won’t be waiting another 13 years for another narrative feature from Wright.

Mission received its world premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival 2026