Justin Lin, once at the helm of the Fast & Furious franchise — including entries four through six, as well as two and nine — has made a change with the peculiar, personal Last Days. His latest backtracks through the life of John Allen Chau, a young, zealous American missionary, who in 2018 made unlikely, illegal contact with the reclusive people of North Sentinel Island. The film is adapted from a 2019 Outside magazine article by Alex Perry that chronicles Chau’s attempt to reach North Sentinel Island — to “save” its inhabitants. The Sentinelese are an isolated tribe of people indigenous to the Andaman archipelago in the Bay of Bengal. They are some of the last, most stalwart holdouts against the crushing wave of globalization, modernization, and colonialism. While other tribes among the Andaman and Nicobar islands saw subjugation under the fist of colonial rule — forced religious conversion, penal colonies, trading posts — the Sentinelese remained reclusive, and often violent. In modern times, this enigmatic enclave was romanticized as the post-Enlightenment ideal of pre-modern humanity, and for Christian missionaries — one of whom, John Allen Chau, never returned — they became something like the holy grail.
Lin’s film hews closely to Perry’s article, which follows the syndicated media account but also includes snippets from Chau’s own journal. Lin fills in the narrative gaps by, as he says it, taking Chau’s words at “face value.” The more Lin read John’s writing, the more he came to appreciate him as a storyteller, a man crafting his own adventure. John’s notebook almost seems to mimic authors like Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe, if their work had been laced with a heavy dose of Christian proselytizing. In this way, Chau was seen as something of a collaborator by Lin and screenwriter Ben Ripley. Lin asked, “Who am I to judge what was real and what wasn’t,” and decided that they would shape John’s narrative around his version of events, allowing him to participate in this telling of his story in spirit. The thrust of Last Days, then, is an attempt at understanding John Allen Chau as a person.
Chau is played by relative newcomer Sky Yang (Rebel Moon), whose face, which, beyond the dolloped dialogue that provides our immediate ticket to John’s mind, can seem impenetrable, vacuous. Yang is often only able to communicate surface-level sentiment, even to the degree of teen-drama affect, and yet for the young evangelizer’s age, persuasion, and ambitions, this almost seems apt. Lin dryly introduces us to Chau’s milieu with a graduation sermon at Oral Roberts University, followed by a celebratory dinner with a typically American upper-middle-class flavor. His Gen Z stare is so insistent that it almost becomes part of the film’s setting, but Yang succeeds in embodying a transformation. But Last Days isn’t just Hollywood portraiture: much of the film’s scope was achieved by traveling the globe, following Chau’s footsteps through the wilderness, and by the time Yang had gone to many of the remote places that the young missionary had traveled to, the actor had lost 30 pounds, and taken on the quietude of his character’s single-minded pursuit. In other words, the impact of the grueling filming process seems to have worked: the further we progress towards John’s “last days,” the more interiority Yang brings to the screen.
It’s clear that Lin is more interested in revealing the layers of influences that lead Chau to that fateful, misguided first encounter than he is in either justifying or chastising his actions. The child of an immigrant father, Chau was a dreamer in search of a purpose. John’s graduation gift from his mother is a bespoke journal to “write (his) own adventure novel with.” From his father, he receives a gilded stethoscope, and thus we see him subjected to a diverging future. Lin, in his attempt to eke humanity from the headlines, isn’t bothering with subtlety. Chau’s bizarre quest, for Lin, is a deeply personal one that stems from a universal human need for purpose. The film works as a restructuring of Chau’s life because it doesn’t assume moral authority. Had it, Last Days would’ve been dead in the water.
On a mission in Kurdistan, Chau links up with a pair of demonstrably more radical missionaries, Kayla (Ciara Bravo) and Chandler (Toby Wallace), whose motto is “first one to heaven wins.” They argue that “what makes somebody a saint,” in this day and age, is a willingness to cut through red tape. To venture to the “darkest corners” of the globe, shining Christ’s light, with disregard for the geopolitical consequences of lines on a map. These freewheeling proselytizers dream of trips to the deepest Amazon jungles or to North Korea, and they know the coordinates of North Sentinel Island by heart. This sequence proves to be one of the most compelling in the film, not least for the sublimated sexual tension that fuses through these young people as they galvanize the longings of Christian “grail seekers” of millennia past. In, perhaps, the devout missionary’s version of a threesome, with John as the third wheel, their small aircraft coasts over the meeting of the Tigris and Euphrates, the biblical Garden of Eden, and Chandler asks John, “wanna fly her a bit?”
Scenes oscillate between the airy coverage of a big-budget documentary and the forced interiority of imposed close-ups. Lin’s style sometimes seems to want to be anthropological, but too often finds itself chained awkwardly to a drama of shaky internal conflict. And so much of the film’s success weighs upon a compelling back-and-forth of time-hopping. John traverses an epic, sweeping travel montage that serves as preparation for his final act. He joins the “Anchorites,” a sort of boot camp for the special forces of missionary work. He becomes hermetic, reserved, a bearded pilgrim. Family and friends only catch glimpses of him on social media as he ranges through the wildest parts of the globe.
This reconstruction is intercut with the slower-moving police work happening in Port Blair (in a forward leap in time), where Meera Ganali (Radhika Apte), a plucky, determined new inspector, is following leads regarding a missing American. Illegal expeditions to North Sentinel Island are taken seriously by the Indian authorities, and though the local police are shown as dysfunctional provincials, Ganali proves up to the task. She remains hot on Chau’s trail while we rewind through the process of radicalization that brought him to this point.
Caught crosswind between a singular action adventure flick like Thirteen Lives (2022) or Society of the Snow (2023), while attempting to attain a personal poetry and spiritual focus more akin to Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016), Last Days is compelling as a travel documentary pumped through with the filmmaking craft of Hollywood action flicks — Lin’s bread and butter. An astute filmmaker, with his leering, crystal-sharp wide-angle lens and a menagerie of action cam footage and intense POV angles, he crafts a taut adventure saga on a small budget (at least, a smaller budget than F9). The thematic and emotional impulses — the drama — are at once the film’s core failing and its saving grace. Lin’s insistence on the centrality of John’s inner life works overtime to elevate the film, and together with the director’s ever compelling style, this storytelling philosophy gives the form an edge that similar efforts lack.
Yet the film digresses into kitschy lulls at times, whenever intrapersonal emotional fodder floats to the surface, especially so when investigating John’s vague relationship with his father, Patrick (Ken Leung). The emotional nucleus of their relationship is posited in a seascape painting of a ship caught in a storm that won Patrick top prize at a county fair. The painting, which carries with it connotations of seafaring adventure novels like Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, imparts a deep wanderlust into John’s psyche, and acts out a symbolic role within the film not unlike Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud.” But this throughline is as clunky as it is poignant, and though sentimentality in itself isn’t always something to fear, but in execution here in consistently rings the alarm bells of approaching, inelegant melodrama. More properly clumsy is a subtly staged undercurrent of Apte’s character that all at once comes crashing down over our heads, as if its gratification could wait no longer. Other thematic ties bore into us at a more sagacious pace, taking longer to fester. Even the most obvious of thematic interests — the hovering threat of colonialism that circles the Sentinelese people — is more muted, and delivered by a discreet, underhanded turn.
What successes are to be found in Last Days stem from its defiance of cookie-cutter moralizing, foregoing the most damning of public perception in its attempt to portray Chau as a real human with the kind of underlying beliefs and doubts that are universal to the human condition. This modicum of restraint makes Lin’s film all the more powerful as a cautionary tale. Yang’s Chau is a martyr to his own insecurity, a young man who must reject even the most fleeting of intimacy, his last temptation, in order to fulfill the mystical quest he’s set for himself. Lin here proves himself to once again be an independent filmmaker to look out for, and if Last Days is an imperfect and sometimes miscalibrated film, it’s also a stimulating watch that defies expectations more often than it stumbles.
DIRECTOR: Justin Lin; CAST: Sky Yang, Radhika Apte, Ken Leung, Marny Kennedy; DISTRIBUTOR: Vertical; IN THEATERS: October 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 59 min.
Comments are closed.