SUNDANCE: ‘Last Days’ Sanitizes The Ugly Reality Of Missionaries

Director Justin Lin and writer Ben Ripley rip a story from the headlines and present the audience with their version of a “tragedy” in Last Days (2025). To be honest, I don’t like describing the 2018 death of John Allen Chau as tragic. But here we are after it took the world by storm, got a documentary, and has become a story told across churches. The film is based on Alex Perry’s Outside Magazine article “The Last Days of John Allen Chau.”

Last Days (2025) centers on John Chau (Sky Yang), the American missionary who died trying to convert the people of North Sentinel Island. The film’s synopsis describes John’s missionary work as a “dangerous adventure,” and that is the lens with which you can expect to see it explored as well.

Lin takes the audience through John Allen Chau’s life, beginning with his graduation from the evangelical Oral Robert’s University, which prioritizes proselytizing above all else. To his parents’ frustration, John chooses to leave medical school and begin traveling the world as a missionary. At 26, he takes on his greatest challenge, bringing “the name of Jesus” to one of the last remaining “dark” places on the planet: North Sentinel Island.

But this isn’t just John’s story. Justin Lin transforms the story into a dramatic film that teeters on the edge of a detective thriller. He introduces us to a fictional Indian detective (Radhika Apte) and her incompetent boss (Naveen Andrews) from the Andaman Islands, who is racing to stop him before he harms the tribe.

To his credit, Justin Lin does take time to map out the path of radicalization that John Allen Chau walks, primarily once her leaves the grasp of his controlling father (Ken Leung)—which runs counter to what we have seen in the 2023 documentary about his life—and what meeting one radically masculine and abrasive missionary (Toby Wallace) does to a man in his 20s. For Lin, as fanaticism grows, so does John’s connection to a purpose that goes beyond just living. The path is explored and nearly every step is presented as something that is preying on John’s lack of self-esteem. Why should John believe in himself if he has Jesus?

From a technical perspective, Justin Lin’s direction and Nathan Alexander’s editing help shape visually exciting scenes as the story takes place. The film’s approach to storytelling begins with the act itself and unpacks John’s past in each act. The way each act transitions to the next is expertly done.

Additionally, Sky Yang’s performance as John Chau, despite the script’s tackling of the legacy that Chau leaves behind, is excellent. Yang provides the audience with an earnest look at devotion and loneliness and how obsession branches out from admiration. But when we dig into the story that Justin Lin and Ben Ripley have crafted, it is more fabrication than a true story, or at the very least, a story of disconnected points.

It’s an introspective approach that starts off strong. However, as Lin continues highlighting John’s critique, it begins to remove John’s agency. The sadder we see him, the lonelier we see him and the more he connects to God. His rejections fuel his mission, and after the first act, the introspection shifts from important practice to understanding something Lin clearly views as a tragedy to almost justifying John’s actions.

Last Days (2025) sanitizes dedication to missionary work to find a justification for the death of a man who should still be alive. 

While watching Last Days, the third act began to make me feel deeply uncomfortable. Not because Justin Lin had crafted a story so compelling that I was invested in Chau and rooting for him. No. I was deeply uncomfortable because, despite the attempts to paint the action of mission trips as a holdover of colonialism and detrimental to those being proselytized, it really means nothing. John is someone we are supposed to feel empathetic to, and we are to see his death, within the context of the film, as an inevitable suicide journey because he has nowhere else to go.

It’s frustrating to see. In one stroke, the script sanitizes the ugly reality of missionary work and, in the other, undercuts John’s dedication to his faith. If you’ve read through the articles on his death or even watched National Geographic‘s The Mission, John returned to North Sentinal Island to enter “Satan’s last stronghold,” not because he was rejected by every person he tried to reach out to. From the language of his journal to his lifelong dedication to spreading the gospel, everything about this representation sanitizes a memory that is better used as a lesson for others.

While I do not condone or have any shred of empathy for John Allen Chau’s actions, the fact that the film repackages his memory when his parents and his church have spoken differently is insulting and ultimately an attempt to rewrite his fanatical obsessions into something they weren’t. They weren’t a cry for help or a yearning from loneliness; they were a singular commitment to the Evangelical “Great Commission.”

Justin Lin’s filmmaking may be artistically vibrant when it comes to recounting events. However, this based on a true story offers little in the way of fact and deals too liberally with fiction. Better yet, he throws in pieces of John’s life (like his father’s painting, the adventure notebook he kept, and even the people he encountered in his life) without ever building any weight or connectivity between them.

But while we see the path of radicalization, the film takes little time to dissect the relationship between John, and his father. It’s done through small clips but never embraces the stirring intergenerational story at its fingertips. The thyroid medication his father illegally prescribed changes to pain meds. The religious divide between father and son is distilled down to the well-tread story of medical school vs a dream. There is no depth to be found here. Instead, we look at John’s father through a glass, and we are asked to fill in the missing pieces. When those pieces have been made available in another film, it feels like a failure.

John Allen Chau’s story is hard to contain in just two hours. 

At two hours, the film presents us with pieces of his life and loneliness and explores his fanaticism as something that isn’t sincere but more impacted by his inability to connect to others, much of which is blamed on his faith. At two hours, John feels like a man created to speak to the epidemic of male loneliness through Christianity, when the documentary and personal account via his diary do not.

Despite my disbelief in God, the reality is that John Allen Chau was a devoted servant to a god he believed had put him on the earth to speak about Jesus to the Sentinelese. Last Days stirps him of that devotion, primarily because of how it presents his first and second trips to the island. In short, there is too much made up, too much of history out of place.

It’s disingenuous to tell a story that is only seven years old with so much reconstructed to appeal to audiences. This has always happened with biographical dramas. However, when dealing with a subject matter so thorny that it facilitated large amounts of disapproval for the missionary movements, it is an exercise that should have been left on the drafting table.

The truth is that your thoughts on Last Days hinge on your ignorance of Evangelism, missionary work, and, ultimately, John Chau. Enter the film with an understanding of any of these. You will find yourself consistently distracted, whether by Chau’s portrayal or the secondary storyline with the Indian Police, which, despite being a good attempt at a thrilling manhunt, falls flat due to the film’s shifting perspective.

Justin Lin’s Last Days (2025) will undoubtedly find its audience. With no clear stance on John Allen Chau’s choices, Lin attempts to make you cry for John instead of deeply unpacking the fact that his death was far from written into destiny. To this day, Evangelicals use John to inspire their mission work and continue to drive worshippers into the hearts of people who would have been better left alone. To them, John is a martyr with agency and identity. To Justin Lin and Ben Ripley, John Allen Chau was just a sad child.

Last Days (2025) premiered at 2025 Sundance Film Fest.