Missionary

About Missionary

Overview

Missionary is a 2013 drama thriller film by Anthony DiBlasi. It received its world premiere on July 25, 2013 at the Fantasia International Film Festival and stars Dawn Olivieri as a single mother caught up in one man's obsession with her. Plot summary Katherine (Dawn Olivieri) is a mother trying to raise her son Kesley (Connor Christie) the best she can, despite being recently separated from her husband Ian (Kip Pardue). When Mormon missionary Elder Kevin Brock (Mitch Ryan) offers to help her son practice football, both he and Katherine are drawn to one another. Despite some worries about the 10 year age difference between the two of them, Katherine and Kevin are initially happy in their blossoming relationship. It takes a sour turn when Katherine decides to try to work things out with her estranged husband, which doesn't sit well with Kevin. Already a little mentally unstable, Kevin's warped mind tries to use his religion to justify making Katherine his... forever. Cast Dawn Olivieri as Katherine Kingsman Mitch Ryan as Kevin Brock Kip Pardue as Ian Kingsman J. LaRose as Sarge Powell Connor Christie as Kesley Kingsman Jordan Woods-Robinson as Alan Whitehall Randy Molnar as President Andersen Danielle Kimberley as April Britton Dushawn Moses as Doctor West Jesse Malinowski as Elder Lillejord Jeff Chase as Brian Mary Lankford Poiley as Crystal (as Mary Lankford) Reception Critical reception for Missionary has been mixed to positive, and Dread Central called the movie an "exemplary specimen of human horror done right.". Part of the film's criticism stemmed from the movie's familiarity to other films in the stalker/slasher genre, but Fearnet noted that "You know most of what Missionary has in store before you hit play, but the final product is still a well-crafted and efficient little thriller." Several reviewers brought up concerns about whether or not the film would be considered offensive to people and Empire Online commented that DiBlasi and crew were "careful not to demonise the entire religion, and [took] time to make its elders likeably normal". Bloody Disgusting gave the film a positive review and wrote that "DiBlasi has crafted a tightly wound downward spiral of infidelity, violence, and small-town adversity that’s a model of restraint."

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Notable quotes

“The white man is very clever. He came quietly with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958), Ch. 20.
“Conversion in the sense of self-purification, self-realization, is the crying need of the hour. That, however, is not what is meant by proselytising. To those who would convert India, might it not be said, ‘physician heal thyself’?”
— Mahatma Gandhi The Collected Works Volume 46, New Delhi, 1971, pp. 28-29. As quoted in Goel, S.R. History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)
“India provides a particularly soft target. The Christian missions are welcome to open their purse strings in the Islamic and Communist countries of Asia. But the missions there are barred from winning new converts. Hindu India, drowned in poverty and suffering from cultural self-forgetfulness, is the only country in Asia which provides the quid pro quo.”
— S. R. Goel, Hindu Society under Siege (1981)
“When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the Land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
— Jomo Kenyatta, reported in John Frederick Walker, A Certain Curve of Horn: The Hundred-Year Quest for the Giant Sable Antelope of Angola (2004), p. 144; also attributed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
“Cambridge University established a prize named for an essay competition on the topic: 'The best means of civilizing the subjects of the British Empire in India, and of diffusing the light of the Christian religion throughout the eastern world.'”
— Indras Net by Rajiv Malhotra, p 133
“This heroism was also that of the first missionaries. They had a life expectancy of about 5 years in Congo, and some were given extremely anointing at the time of their journey to Africa. There were many young idealists. Their graves are still lined up in the Mpala locality, which overlooks Lake Tanganyika. The Catholic mission was a fort where people who fled slavers and brutality took refuge.”
— Marcel Yabili The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, the Genius and Builder King of Lumumba Chapter: External-internal quarrels, page 34. Lubumbashi, AFNIL, 2021.

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.