Director Paul Wright on set
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Director Paul Wright Pushes George MacKay to the Edge in ‘Mission’: ‘How Do You Feel Something When You’ve Been Numbed to the Modern World?’
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.
Rosy McEwan as Claire in “Mission”
Diana Patient
“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.”
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When Britain’s former Prime Minister Keir Starmer stood down as the member of parliament for Holborn and St Pancras this week, he ended more than a decade representing a seat that has never elected anyone but a Labour MP since it was established in 1983.
The by-election it triggered which is expected later this year would ordinarily be a formality, but instead, it has become the most closely watched contest of the parliamentary term.
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That is because Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, the self-styled “eco-populist”, who has taken his party from the margins to double-digit polling in a year, announced on Thursday that he will seek nomination for the seat. He now needs to be chosen by local party members as the Green candidate for the seat.
Voting records offer him both encouragement and a warning.
Starmer won 48.9 per cent of the vote in 2024; the Greens finished third on 10.4 per cent, behind a pro-Palestinian independent, Andrew Feinstein.
But in the Camden council elections in May, the borough the constituency is in, the Greens won 28.8 percent across its wards to Labour’s 38.8, taking seats in Starmer’s own patch for the first time.
Al Jazeera spoke to political scientists and election analysts about whether Polanski has a realistic path to Westminster.
A Green win would be a ‘surprise’
Since Polanski became Green Party leader a year ago, it has achieved some success in taking support from Labour’s left.
That includes a surprise by-election victory in Greater Manchester, while the party is currently polling as high as 20 percent nationally.
Despite the Green Party’s recent results in Camden, experts say that Holborn and St Pancras is a strong Labour seat.
“A Green win would be a surprise,” Jonathan Tonge, professor of politics at the University of Liverpool, told Al Jazeera.
For that to change, he said, the current prime minister and Labour leader, Andy Burnham, would have to see his “honeymoon period” end quickly. A “disastrous budget” on October 28 could do just that, he added.
He also said the timing of the by-election is key.
“If Burnham has a good party conference in Liverpool (in late September), the honeymoon should continue until that budget at least; the later the by-election, the trickier for Labour. They will want a quick contest.”
Burnham came to power after nine years as mayor of Greater Manchester and arrived untainted by scandals.
To many Britons, it felt refreshing, after Starmer’s appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington – despite his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
In an August YouGov survey, 46 percent of Britons had a favourable opinion of Burnham.
In contrast to Starmer’s lawyerly caution, Burnham brings a more down-to-earth, outsider style that seeks to cut through Westminster politics, an approach that Polanski has echoed.
Polanski’s history at play
Polanski’s critics have said he would look parachuted in, while he says he has lived and worked in the area for years.
Polanski told Camden New Journal, “I have lived and worked in this community over many years. I know it well, and I love it”.
“It represents so many of the things that make London so special. I am so excited by the prospect of representing this place in Parliament,” he is quoted as saying.
But Tonge said Polanski is seen “as too left-wing by some voters who prefer the safer Labour option”.
The so-called “Burnham bounce” Labour is revelling in may also hamper Polanski’s chances, he said.
The Green leader’s political history may also stand in his way, John McTernan, political secretary to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, told Al Jazeera, pointing out that Polanski first stood in the constituency in 2015 as a Liberal Democrat, winning 96 votes in a Camden council by-election.
He also had to apologise earlier this year over a council tax issue on his houseboat, with a Green Party spokesperson saying: “Zack apologises sincerely for the unintentional mistake”.
He later admitted he had not voted in May’s local election, saying he had been moving and “fell short of time” to register at his new address.
Greens may have ‘peaked’: Expert
The Greens have never been here before. From 2010 to 2024, they had just one MP.
That changed in February when the Greens won the Gorton and Denton by-election. Hannah Spencer, a local plumber and Green councillor, won 40.7 per cent of the vote in an area Labour had represented since 1931.
It marked the Greens’ first-ever parliamentary by-election win, their highest by-election vote share by a margin of 30 points. The win ushered in their first MP in the north of England.
In May, across London, they went from 18 council seats to 279, taking six boroughs and winning their first directly elected mayors in Hackney and Lewisham, while Labour recorded its worst London local result since 1968. Nationally, the party won 587 seats, its highest ever.
The Greens have momentum on their side but may have “peaked”, said Tonge.
McTernan said Polanski should be wary of conflating this year’s successes with evidence of his own popularity. He should instead see them as dissatisfaction with Starmer and a “message sent by progressive voters” that they didn’t want him.
The August YouGov survey also shows that just 19 percent of Britons now have a favourable opinion of Polanski, down seven points from his peak in April.
McTernan said putting Polanski forward may hamper the Greens as “by-elections often punish candidates perceived as focused on their own self-importance”.
He pointed to Clacton, where Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right, anti-immigration party Reform UK, resigned his seat in July amid scrutiny of his finances and then recontested it.
With the main parties boycotting that election, the satirical candidate Count Binface, a comedian who campaigns wearing a bin on his head, took 26.7 percent of the vote, the highest share ever won by a novelty candidate in a British parliamentary election.
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