Sundance review: 'The Mission' goes inside the Latter-day Saint missionary experience, showing young people facing the challenges of two years away from home.

I have seen a lot of movies made by and about members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — dramas, comedies, documentaries, you name it — and I can say that director Tania Anderson’s “The Mission” is one of the most thorough and thoughtful depictions of Latter-day Saint life ever put on screen.

Anderson is an outsider — neither raised in the church nor converted to it — so she comes in to the subject fairly fresh, with a minimum of preconceptions, and with a generous curiosity for what these teens are experiencing on their spiritual adventure.

The film follows four teens — three from Utah, one from Idaho — through their two-year missions to Finland (where Anderson lives). The film starts with the foursome in their homes, preparing for their departures. Then it’s off to the Missionary Training Center in Provo, for some whirlwind lessons in Finnish, which the teens discover is a pretty difficult language — for example, as a teacher warns, the words for “meet” and “kill” should very similar, so they must be careful not to confuse them.

Then it’s off to Finland, where the elders and sisters get assigned to their mission companions and their towns. There’s some doorbelling, and standing out in public squares trying to greet passersby — but there are also service projects, like cleaning houses for the elderly.

Anderson shows that finding converts is part of the job of these missionaries, the true spiritual work is within — as the elders and sisters learn to be better people, making friends with their companions and learning to listen to those who don’t agree with their church.

Not that there aren’t moments of humor, when the teens are just being themselves. One of my favorites involves Sister McKenna Field, an earnest young woman from St. George, who notes that older people in Finland like a particularly awful flavor of ice cream — and how accepting it from them becomes a test of politeness.

What makes “The Mission” so compelling is that Anderson doesn’t take sides — this is neither a screed against religious neo-colonialism, as the church’s detractors may put it, or a church-produced film about how wonderful missionary work is. Anderson’s approach is anthropological, more interested in depicting these young people as just people.

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‘The Mission’

★★★1/2

Premiered Monday, January 24, in the World Cinema Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Wednesday, January 26, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, but probably PG for mild language and mature themes. Running time: 95 minutes.