Justin Lin Puts His Audience in the Missionary’s Position in Last Days

Film Reviews

Sundance Film Review: Last Days
Director: Justin Lin
Perfect Storm Entertainment, Outside Magazine, Gotham Group
Premiere: 01.28

The 2023 documentary The Mission, from filmmakers Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, blew me away, getting stuck in my head for months and earning a spot on my best of the year list. In Last Days, director Justin Lin tackles the same story as a narrative feature, and though his reach slightly exceeds his grasp, he earns props for reaching.

The nonlinear format of Last Days begins as 26-year-old John Allen Chau (Sky Yang, Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire), an Asian American evangelical Christian missionary, is approaching North Sentinel Island, an isolated world untouched by the outside world, in an attempt to bring the Sentinelese people to Jesus Christ and save their souls. The narrative then jumps back to John’s days at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, where, despite attempts by his father Patrick Chau (Ken Leung, Old, Industry) to steer him toward a medical career, John feels pulled to a higher calling. As a child, John immersed himself in adventure stories and dreamed of living one, and at college, he becomes enamored with missionary work. After breaking the news to his parents that he’s not going to be a doctor, John goes to Georgia to take part in a training program for prospective missionaries, which is part survivalist boot camp and part ridiculous live-action role play. John then sets out to see the world, and meets a fellow missionary, Chandler (Toby Wallace, Babyteeth, The Bikeriders), who introduces him to the idea of North Sentinel Island as the ultimate challenge. As the movie shifts to 2018, an Indian police officer, Meera (Radhika Apte, Saali Mohabbat), investigates John’s disappearance, piecing together his plans through social media and a recovered journal, and we follow John as he sets forth to make contact with the reclusive Indigenous tribe, leading to tragic results.

The true story of the reckless and highly illegal endeavor that John Allen Chau undertook is a riveting story of dueling moralities and worldviews. By John’s belief system, he was called by God to spread His word to all the people of the earth and to save the Sentinelese from eternal damnation, more than justifying the risks and the lawbreaking. By any other point of view, he was intruding in a place where he had no business being, bringing outside germs and something potentially something even more dangerous — self-righteous colonialist dogma — to a protected people living in peace the way they wanted it. In the documentary format of The Mission, there’s room to explore multiple angles and the philosophical and ethical questions in depth, but Lin doesn’t have that luxury here. Last Days is a character study and fact-based thriller, and it’s an involving one at that. The director, who got his start at Sundance in 2002 with Better Luck Tomorrow, is making a major U-turn back into the indie lane after spending over a decade overseeing the Fast & Furious franchise. He’s admirably committed to humanizing John, and does so very effectively. Where Lin and screenwriter Ben Ripley (Source Code) not only fail, but don’t even try, is in humanizing the Sentinelese people. This is less an intentional slight than it is a simple function of the approach that Lin and Ripley have taken, telling the story from John’s point of view. One can make a persuasive argument that, as no one has ever interacted with the tribe, it would be impossible to do anything else, yet there’s still a frustrating lack of context that makes them feel more like a plot device than a group of people. This is John’s story, certainly, but we still need to get at least a vague sense the people he’s trying to reach have a story, too, even if it happens off screen.

Sky gives a commanding and charismatic performance, and shows great potential as a leading man. The young actor does everything he can to balance the need for part of us to root for John to succeed at his mission with the reality that he can’t, he won’t and he absolutely shouldn’t be trying it at all. Apte is effective and engaging as the relentless investigator, a fictional character who represents the rational and reasoned alternative viewpoint to John’s delusions of grandeur. She’s largely reduced to a stock character, the disrespected yet fiercely dedicated “lady cop” who follows her hunch and goes around the cartoonishly inept, lazy and sexist chief of police (Naveen Andrews, The Dropout), and the impact of her storyline is minimal. Leung is terrific as John’s distraught father, and the film would have done well to give him significantly more screen time.  

Last Days is a compelling film, and it’s unfair to completely throw it under the bus simply because it pales in comparison to The Mission (which is streaming on Disney+ and belongs in your queue). It’s a solidly involving cautionary tale that showcases Lin’s skill as a filmmaker, though much like John Allen Chau, it sets out to achieve greatness without fully understanding how to do so, and while the film is more successful in its mission than its tragically misguided protagonist was, it still doesn’t quite live up to its divine calling. —Patrick Gibbs

Read more of SLUG’s coverage of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.