One of the earliest shots in the documentary The Mission hangs from a distance on North Sentinel Island, a remote speck of Indian jungle located along the southeast edge of the Bay of Bengal. Thick, gray clouds clog the sky overhead. Trees, nearly black in the gloom, crowd so close to the water that you can hardly make out a sliver of sandy shore. The island is far away, and it is alone. Its inhabitants, we will soon learn, intend to keep it that way.
Seeing the island at such a remove engenders a complicated yearning — why can’t we just push a little bit closer, see a little more clearly, one wonders. But this complication is quickly smoothed over by suspenseful music thrumming underneath: This is adventure, not meditation, the soundtrack says. The incongruity concisely foreshadows the jumbled film to come, in which San Francisco filmmakers Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss search for nuance in a sensational news event while struggling to resist its convenient thrills.
The Mission retells the viral story of American missionary John Chau, who in November 2018 disappeared off the coast of North Sentinel Island while trying to convert the island’s Indigenous people to Christianity. The island is home to what may be the last uncontacted Indigenous group on Earth: a Stone Age people who have consistently refused interaction with the outside world by shooting — and several times killing — visitors with arrows. Chau, 26 at the time, eluded Indian naval ships charged with guarding the island by hitching a ride on a small wooden fishing boat. It is believed that after twice rebuffing his entreaties, tribesmen killed Chau and buried him on their shore.
Chau’s death drew breathless media coverage from across the globe, and a logline for The Mission reads that the documentary “uncovers the gripping story behind the headlines.” But it’s difficult to discern what in the film, if anything, needed uncovering. The movie contributes little information that wasn’t previously reported in newspaper features or magazine narratives, revolving loosely, instead, around widely reported entries from Chau’s journal and a publicly shared letter from his father, who declined to otherwise participate.
The resultant portrait is less vivid than what emerges in written narratives. McBain and Moss hire voice actors to read from Chau’s diary entries and his father’s letter, and play the readings over animated reenactments drawn in a hazy oil-paint style. The animation proves a creative solution to the filmmakers’ lack of access, but like all documentary reenactment, the performances wind up constrained by reality. Likewise, the written words are constrained by the actors’ specific dramatic choices. Where the diary entries take on a certain symbolic weight when presented unadorned on a written page, they become itchy and over-dramatized in the readings, leaving an impersonation of Chau rather than any sense of his true self.
McBain and Moss add to this source material a host of original interviews with anthropologists, historians and religious experts, as well as archival footage of Chau as a young boy. Ostensibly, the clips are meant to reflect the larger context in which Chau planned and executed his fatal journey, and thus bring him into sharper focus. The clips succeed in this endeavor, to an extent. Histories of the Christian mission movement, for example, give Chau’s conviction mooring and his hubris scale. More often, though, the supplementary materials introduce ideas and subjects that scream out for deeper attention, rendering Chau a distraction.
