Movie Review: Last Days (2025)

For a movie that's literally about a man's final journey, Last Days sure felt like it had the wrong kind of eternity built into its runtime. The story of John Allen Chau, the missionary who attempted to contact the isolated Sentinelese tribe, is inherently gripping. But somehow, director Justin Lin has managed to drain nearly all the drama out of this real-life tragedy, leaving behind a plodding, emotionally confused affair that meanders more than it moves.

The movie opens with news reports about Chau's controversial demise, as if to say, "Look, we're going to give you all sides here." But in its earnest quest for objectivity, the film becomes strangely pointless. It tries so hard not to judge Chau that it fails to paint a convincing picture of who he actually was. Instead of a complex, tragically misguided person, we get a sort of two-dimensional cartoon of a devout Christian. Sky Yang, who plays Chau, does a decent enough job with what he's given, but he's mostly directed to radiate a kind of wide-eyed, Saturday-morning-cartoon enthusiasm. It leaves you constantly wondering what's really going on inside his head, which is, you know, the whole point of a character study.

The film's structure doesn't do it any favors, either. Rather than building a coherent narrative, we find it scattered across multiple, and often unnecessary, plot angles. We follow Chau on his various missionary excursions, and each chapter feels overlong and tiresome. There's a particularly interminable jungle sequence with some Australian tourists that feels like it belongs in a different movie entirely. And then there's the parallel storyline featuring an Indian police inspector trying to track down Chau. While Radhika Apte gives an admirable and impassioned performance, her character's investigation feels like filler material.

This film feels especially frustrating when you know that a better version of this story already exists. The 2023 documentary The Mission covered the same ground with far more tact and insight. Justin Lin's big-budget indie approach feels more like a heist movie—where the prize is the "purity" of the Sentinelese—than a genuine human drama. The result is a movie that's as frustrating to watch as it is to try and understand. For a story that should have resonated with a deep sense of a life lost, Last Days leaves you feeling... well, nothing much at all.