“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” John 1: 5
In 1986, The Mission arrived with the confidence of a prestige epic: sweeping landscapes, Ennio Morricone’s aching score, Robert De Niro hauling a sack of armour up a cliff in penance, the searing image of a martyr being sent over a raging waterfall, strapped to a cross.
Forty years on, some of its assumptions sit uneasily. The film is unambiguous about its Catholic frame, and it depicts the evangelisation of Indigenous peoples as largely benevolent, even redemptive. That tension matters. And yet The Mission endures, not because it gets everything right, but because it wrestles seriously with forgiveness, faith, and grace in a world shaped by violence, which to be honest, 40 years on feels more relevant than ever.
Set in 18th-century South America, the film centres on Jesuit missionaries working among the Guaraní people as colonial borders shift and political protection evaporates. At its heart are two men: Father Gabriel (played wonderfully by Jeremy Irons), whose faith is expressed through gentleness and presence, and Rodrigo Mendoza (the commanding Robert De Niro), a former mercenary slave trader who murders his brother and is consumed by guilt and seeks absolution from Father Gabriel. Their stories converge around a question that still feels urgent four decades later: what does repentance look like when harm cannot be undone?
Rodrigo’s conversion is the film’s most explicit meditation on forgiveness. His penance, dragging the tools of his oppression up a near-vertical cliff, has often been criticised as theatrically heavy-handed. But the symbolism is blunt for a reason. Rodrigo believes forgiveness must be earned through suffering. He cannot imagine grace without pain. The Guaraní, however, forgive him for killing and enslaving their own, not because he has suffered enough, but because they choose to release him. They cut the rope. The weight falls away. It is a moment that resists transactional morality.
Forgiveness is not a wage paid for endurance; it is a gift freely given.
That distinction is central to Christian theology, but it also resonates far beyond it. In an age still wrestling with restorative justice, The Mission insists that forgiveness is not the same as forgetting, nor does it erase the past. Rodrigo is changed, but the structures that enabled his violence remain. Grace transforms a person, not a system. The film does not fully explore that gap, but it gestures toward it, and that gesture is part of its lasting power.
Faith, in The Mission, is not presented as a single posture. Father Gabriel’s approach is relational and non-coercive. He learns the Guaraní language. He plays music rather than preaching first. His faith is embodied, quiet, and patient. By contrast, the institutional Church, represented through political compromise and distant authority, appears brittle and calculating. When the Jesuits are ordered to abandon the mission, faith is tested not in belief but in obedience. Is faithfulness about survival, or about witness?
The film’s answer is ambiguous, and that ambiguity is one of its strengths. Gabriel chooses martyrdom, believing that non-violence is the truest expression of the Gospel. Rodrigo, having once been a man of violence, takes up arms to defend the community he now loves. Both are acting from faith. Both pay with their lives. The film refuses to neatly resolve which response is “right.” Instead, it suggests that faith is lived in tension, shaped by conscience, context, and cost.
This is where The Mission remains provocative. It does not offer a tidy theology. It shows faith colliding with empire, economics, and fear. The Church’s failure in the film is not a loss of belief, but a loss of courage. Its leaders are complicit and know what is happening to the Guaraní is wrong, but they choose political expediency. This is even borne out in the films final frames, after the credits for the film have finished the Cardinal looks straight at the camera – he has made his choice and now must live with the consequences.
Grace, by contrast, appears at the margins: in small acts of mercy, in forgiveness offered without leverage, in people who refuse to abandon their convictions even when doing so would save them. As missions are taken over, Jesuit priests stand resolute in the face of violence.
Of course, the film’s depiction of Indigenous people is limited and shaped by a 1980s Western gaze. The Guaraní are often presented as noble and spiritually intuitive, but rarely as complex agents of their own destiny. Their conversion to Catholicism is treated as an unproblematic good, a framing that today demands critical dialogue. Enduring relevance does not mean uncritical admiration. It means being willing to hold a work to account while still recognising what it gets right.
What The Mission gets right is its understanding of grace as costly and disruptive. Grace unsettles power. It exposes hypocrisy. It asks more of institutions than they are often willing to give. In a world where faith is frequently reduced to branding or ideology, the film insists on faith as lived risk. Forgiveness, too, is shown not as sentiment but as action – an act that can change a life, even if it cannot save a system.
Forty years on, The Mission remains a film worth arguing and wrestling with. Its beauty is not just visual but moral, found in its refusal to let faith be comfortable. It reminds us that forgiveness is not a strategy, grace is not a reward, and faith, at its best, is not about control but about surrender.
That message, imperfectly delivered though it may be, is why the film still matters.
