By 2002 Sundance Film Festival premiere by Justin LinDege debut “Better luck tomorrow”, Roger Ebert was famous in the audience to punish an audience member to question whether it was irresponsible for Lin to depict Asian Americans as criminals. Back at the festival two decades and five “Fast & Furious” movies laterIt is unlikely that Lin will see the same level of burning passion from someone who participates in his latest film, “Last days. “
Another exploration of identity, responsibility and mistakes young people tend to make when they are, “last days” is based on a tagged and Fascinating true history: That by John Allen Chau, the 26-year-old American missionary killed in 2018 after kayaking to the distant northern Sentinel Island to spread Christianity to a local tribe. Nevertheless, all the promise of this condition is to be destroyed in lens adaptation, which in style and structure chops to the Hackneyed Convention on every turn.
After a brief overrun that blinks up to this sad event, the film flushes about following John (Sky Yang) as he approaches graduation from his Christian college. His father (Ken Leung from “Industry”) is determined that John should become a doctor, even give him a stethoscope after his graduation ceremony. But John feels drawn on the path that God has planned for him – whatever it may be – and he is pretty sure that medical school is not part of it. So when a family crisis provides an opportunity for John to break away and start a missionary, he boards a plane and never looks back.
The remainder of the film takes the form of a parallel measure drama and turns between double timelines: John’s peregrinations as a missionary in the early 20th century; And the race to find John on the days leading up to his visit to North Sentinel Island. The latter event center not on John but on a fictional player in the story: Meera (Radhika Ape), a rude Indian officer trying to stop John from going into his treacherous journey and imposing her ideology, if only she can get past the professional obstacles as her ridiculously condescendingly condescending officer (Naveen William Sidney Andrews). (As if a time traveler from the middle of the century refers the superior officer at a time to Meera as “an ambitious Dampol.”)
The fact that Meera’s history is even within the context of “last days” should trigger alarm bells and a knowing eye roll. This is the Hollywoodized version of John’s Story: a saccharin and heated spectacle that is completely darkened by one of the thought -provoking complexity of the real events in its core. Like Meera – the Invisible Hero of the Movie – competes against the clock to find John, also steam the script into her own Tale of Marginalized Identity, a B-Plot-Scorad only to strengthen her affinity with the Sentinelese she hopes to protect from John’s move.
The John sections cover a much broader time frame and jump among a handful of their experiences as a missionary and explorer all over the world. A significant part takes place in Kurdistan, where John first meets Chandler (a Magnetic Toby Wallace), a co -mission that operates on a more radical agenda. For John, Chandler acts as both a revolutionary mentor and an understanding of a friend and offers a valuable sense of alliance and purpose that fills a void within John that he didn’t even know was there. Chandler is one of several side characters that John encounters on his journey that stands in for the hordes of people who encouraged him, either explicitly or implicitly, to persecute North Sentinel as a holy Gral.
For this purpose, the film’s best sequence is also its most upsetting: it finds that John participates in an American missionary Boot Camp. The scenes follow John and his young cohorts as they penetrate distant forests in search of protection, before a band of training camp leader who exerts spears and speaks a false foreign language and captures them and physically beats them for submission. In real life was run Boot Camp John who participated by an organization called All Nations; In 2018, the group’s international executive leader said John was “one of the best participants in this experience we have ever had.”
The scenes at Boot Camp are that under-your skin is disturbing in a way that the rest of “last days” can only strive to be. The gestures in a wider world where preaching of the gospel and spreads Christian ideology is for some zealots more important than physical and mental security. It is easy to see how John, an adventurer of nature seeking his greater purpose, could have been sucked into what he saw as a chance to please God and do something of himself in the world.
The film’s uninterrupted desire to psychoanalyse John’s fanaticism could have ended at the starting camp. Instead, “last days,” is ironically after its own form of conservatism. Its story is simple, familiar and even didactic and culminates with a Freudian sequence that blinks back to a moment from John’s childhood where his father wins a painting competition at a local fair. It finds John, like a child, walks around the fair alone and cries when he looks for his parents. Even AI could not dream up a more literal depiction of a boy whose primary problem is that he is lost, scared and looking for love.
Rating: C-
“Last Days” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2025. It is currently seeking US distribution.
Want to keep you updated on IndieWire’s movie Reviews And critical thoughts? Subscribe here To our recently launched newsletter, in review by David Ehrlich, where our main film critic and Head Review’s editor rounds off the best new reviews and streaming elections along with some exclusive Musings – all only available for subscribers.
