The Mission (2023)

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  ScreenZealots

  6 / 10

  The true story of how one young man’s obsession with evangelical religion proved fatal provides the shocking backbone to co-directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s “The Mission,” a documentary that will provoke discussion and debate about the ethical implications of Christian missionary work. By interviewing friends, family, researchers, and fellow proselytizers, the film examines the boundaries that perhaps humans shouldn’t cross on their quest to preach the word of their God.
  
  In 2018, 26 year old American missionary John Chau was killed by arrows while attempting to contact one of the world’s most isolated tribes of Indigenous people. Believing God spoke to him, Chau illegally traveled to the remote North Sentinel Island (located off the coast of India) with the intention of teaching about Jesus Christ and the Christian faith. When he arrived, he was met with great resistance. Instead of leaving a place where he clearly wasn’t wanted, Chau persisted. He was eventually fatally wounded by a bow and arrow.
  
  Telling the story of a real life tragedy can’t be an easy task, and Moss and McBaine handle the subject matter delicately when it’s warranted. Their finished film isn’t one that reads as a puff piece because they are unafraid to ask the more difficult questions. They tackle the unanswered questions too, or at least attempt to do some investigative digging into the exact circumstances of Chau’s death (which still remain a mystery, as his body was never recovered). McBaine and Moss present so much information that they have a tough time staying focused.
  
  The greatest insight comes in the form of Chau’s own words that are taken from his diary that was left behind. Some of his journal entries are chilling, especially when Chau laments that the island’s inhabitants must live in “Satan’s last stronghold” because they’d never been exposed to religion. He believed that God had told him to convert these people by sharing the word of God and therefore, offering them salvation. Chau was a man devoted to his beliefs, and that mindset ultimately led to his death. His devotion combined with a reckless cockiness is also what makes him less than sympathetic, and the irony is off the charts. Even Chau’s own father blames his son’s death on what he calls “extreme Christianity.”
  
  The directors keep things moving with interesting interviews, archival photos and videos, and animated interludes, but it’s not the filmmaking that makes “The Mission” so compelling — it’s the story. And this one is one that’s chilling as well as cautionary.
  
  By: Louisa Moore for Screen Zealots

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