Missionary (2013)

Missionary is the kind of intimate thriller that gets under your skin because it starts in a place of recognizable pain—grief, loneliness, and the desperate hope that a kind stranger might be the answer—and then tightens the screws with unnerving patience. Anthony DiBlasi keeps the camera close and the tension closer, letting small gestures and polite smiles curdle into something frightening, while Dawn Olivieri anchors the film with a performance that feels raw, human, and hard to shake. It’s luridly entertaining without being sloppy, a tightly wound downward spiral where obsession wears a clean, convincing face and the dread builds scene by scene. Fair warning: it’s Rated R and it doesn’t shy away from sexuality and violence, so if you prefer your thrillers bloodless or purely escapist, this one may be too intense—but if you like “human horror” that feels plausible, it’s a nasty little gem.

Missionary is clearly aiming for a pulpy, taboo-tinged thriller about grief, loneliness, and how “comfort” can curdle into control, with a Mormon missionary angle meant to add tension and moral conflict. The problem is it plays out like a very familiar stalker template, hitting the expected beats with clunky, sometimes inconsistent writing, so the suspense rarely surprises and the escalation can feel more forced than frightening. If you’re hoping for a smart psychological cat-and-mouse or a fresh twist on obsession, this will likely feel like a reheated Fatal Attraction riff with extra violence and sex to keep it moving. That said, Dawn Olivieri commits to the emotional messiness, and if you’re in the mood for a straightforward, trashy-but-watchable thriller and don’t mind clichés, you may get enough guilty-pleasure mileage out of it.