Terri Joe: Missionary In Miami

Moving from content creation to the big screen has always been a fascinating pipeline. Channels like RackaRacka took their maximalist gore comedy to new heights with the more dramatic project “Talk To Me,” and comedic personalities like Bo Burnham have adapted their original voices into full-bodied scripts that introduce new talents in films like “Eighth Grade." Within these examples lies a crucial distinction: they are not attempts to transition a social media persona onto a cinema screen. They are creators using the sensibilities they formed online as a jumping-off point for something genuinely cinematic, something that could only exist at feature-length.

However, this has not always been the approach. Back in the early 2010s, there was a wave of YouTube creators who looked at the big screen and sought to impart their comedic genius onto Hollywood directly. Looking back on these projects, it's easy to see how they were essentially doomed right from the start. The internet had produced something genuinely new, comedic voices that existed in a direct, unmediated relationship with their audiences, personalities who thrived precisely because there was no filter between them and the camera. However, as with any successful piece of entertainment, there always lies a desire to expand on it, to reach a wider audience with a bigger budget, with the allure of the big screen being too much to ignore.

What worked in short bursts, the chaos, the compression, the feeling that the creator was talking directly and only to you, collapsed under the attempts of translating short dopamine hits into full-length projects. The original voices we came to see became stifled by bloated runtimes and pointless sideplots.

Just from looking at the trailers, I was a bit hesitant as it became apparent this film would be more like the latter projects. Despite my hesitancy, something truly astonishing happened to me within the runtime of this film, I was enjoying it. The characters and situations are no doubt dragged out beyond the confines of the short form structure they would probably find themselves best suited in, but there is an almost maddening quality to the way in which they are stretched out, turning what could've been an easily dismissible failure of a feature length adaptation into something stranger and harder to dismiss. 

We see Terri Joe go through a sequence of increasingly bizarre vignettes loosely stitched together by the script which, in fairness, does have moments that land with the same jarring oddness and humour found within her TikToks, but the connective tissue here is basically non-existent, creating an almost dreamlike feeling, which is accentuated by some off-kilter stylistic choices within the filmmaking like heightened slurping sound effects, very uncomfortable camera angles. One choice in particular digs a little deeper into Terri Joe's character in a surprisingly emotional manner, as she gazes at herself after having a haircut with tears streaming down her face, and we see that she sees herself as the blonde god-fearing white woman that she has previously described as in her TikToks, although I could imagine seeing this as someone unfamiliar with her work and just being truly confused, but I think that just adds to the beautifully surreal nature of the film as a whole. (Side note: if you want to truly enjoy this film don't go looking up the lore around her character as it is wildly conflicting, apparently she's been dead since 2025?)

With such a porous construction of its world and characters, “Missionary In Miami” excels far beyond projects like “FRED: THE MOVIE," which in comparison, is so desperate to be considered a conventional movie with a proper narrative structure, essentially betraying the fabrication of Fred Figglehorn, because he never existed within these conventions, he was the opposite of narrative, a burst of chaos. There is no arc within “Missionary in Miami." Terri is basically just put into these escalating scenarios, and all we can do is just witness it.

Something truly remarkable about this film is that Kelon Campbell doesn't use the feature format as an excuse to reduce Terri Joe's character in a more palatable and conventional manner. Terri Joe in this film is the same Terri Joe who thrived in those short-form videos, retaining her best qualities: casually cruel, fundamentally incorrect about the world, utterly convinced of her own righteousness. The film doesn't explain Terri Joe to you; it simply unleashes her.

It is not a perfect film by any stretch. The surrealism it stumbles into often feels like a byproduct of having a superfluous structure, and the humour found within Terri Joe is an acquired taste for sure, but there is something to admire within the simplicity here. Other filmmakers could have easily mangled Terri Joe's character through over-explaining her under the pretense of narrative obligation, but this film perfectly understood the assignment. You cannot build a film around Terri Joe, you make her the film.

6/10