‘Rust’ Review: Defined by Tragedy, Alec Baldwin’s Cursed Western Offers Halyna Hutchins’ Story a Small but Necessary Sense of Closure

When cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was inadvertently shot and killed by a live round on the set of “Rust” in October of 2021, it seemed unfathomable to me that production would ever be completed — let alone that I would be tasked with reviewing the finished product one day. 

“Twilight Zone: The Movie” and “The Crow” were both released in spite of similar tragedies (in addition to more recent examples like “American Made” and “Deadpool 2,” whose stunt performer deaths sparked considerably less attention), but that was before the internet had so thoroughly flattened every film into the context of its own creation. The horror took on a life of its own when second assistant camerawoman Sarah Jones was fatally struck by a freight train on the first day of filming “Midnight Rider” in February 2014, and the Facebook group that crew members started to oppose resuming the shoot had swelled to more than 10,000 members by April of that year.

And what happened on the set of “Rust” caused such an instant firestorm that most of the film’s production team — huddled together in a tent as police and medical personnel began to address the situation — first learned that Hutchins was dead by reading about it on their phones. 

By the time the sun went down that day, “Rust” had become inextricable from the calamity that had occurred in a small New Mexico church on the 12th day of the film’s production. And while armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed has since been convicted of involuntary manslaughter for her role in the accident, the enduring mystery as to why a live round was loaded into that weapon — and the persistent question of star/producer Alec Baldwin’s culpability in firing it — has only made it more difficult for the movie to escape the dark shadow cast by its production. 

“Rust” was completed for that very reason.

In a bid to create some closure of their own, much of the original cast and crew reunited in the spring of 2023 to finish what they had started 18 months earlier. Some only agreed to do so at the direct urging of Hutchins’ husband, who received an executive producer credit as part of a settlement, and insisted that finishing the movie was the best way of honoring his late wife’s memory and dedication to her craft. 

In that light, whether or not “Rust” is a good movie would seem to be irrelevant; a masterpiece wouldn’t be “worth” the loss of Hutchins’ life, and a disaster wouldn’t make her death any more senseless than it was to begin with. Still, I can’t help but feel as though reviewing the film — a film that’s about to be dumped into a handful of theaters in tandem with its low-profile release on VOD — is a critical step in the project’s transition from a cursed production to a lasting monument. 

I emphasize the purpose of reviewing “Rust” in part because there’s so little else of consequence to say about the movie, a competent but uncompelling Western whose story is saddled with the unfortunate irony of being about an accidental shooting. The triggerman is a 13-year-old orphan named Lucas Hollister (Patrick Scott McDermott, making the most of this grim opportunity), whose younger brother depends on him to protect their late parents’ Wyoming ranch from wolves and other predators. One fateful morning in 1882, Lucas aims his rifle at a four-legged trespasser, only to hit a human villain hiding just over the ridge. The law holds the boy accountable despite his lack of malice, only for Alec Baldwin — of all people — to save Lucas from a noose by murdering all of his jailers.

The two fugitives make a break for the Mexican border: young Lucas and Harland Rust, a legendary outlaw who also happens to be his maternal grandfather. Harland has never met the kid before, and — underneath his cartoonishly gruff exterior, and layers of lily-gilded dialogue like “You tell any son of a bitch who comes after me that he will shake hands with the devil himself” — it’s clear that the old man is eager to make up for lost time, even if Lucas just wants to get home to his little brother. 

And so the long-estranged relatives trek across a rugged sweep of the American Southwest, the hostility between them (very) slowly thawing into something that resembles love as they elude bounty hunters and have campfire heart-to-hearts. Those conversations largely boil down to Harland saying things like “This ain’t no game, boy,” and “There’s alive and there’s ain’t — try to focus on the former,” but even the most derivative aspects of Souza’s script resonate with an inescapable awareness of life’s cruelties. While Hutchins’ memory is obviously most palpable in the movie’s sweeping vistas, backlit interiors, and dusky skies, it’s hard not to feel her presence when sheriff Wood Helm (an effective Josh Hopkins), hot on Harland’s trail, laments the random illness that has befallen his own son. 

Much of Hopkins’ performance is wasted on the lopsided “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” triangle — completed by a devil-eyed Travis Fimmel as ruthless bounty hunter Fenton “Preacher” Lang — that needlessly warps “Rust” well beyond the two-hour mark, but every second of bloat is an extra opportunity to savor the beauty of a film that only exists to be looked at. Hutchins lensed a relatively small fraction of the footage that appears in the finished edition of “Rust,” as several actors had to be recast and their scenes reshot (the church scene was scrapped altogether), but co-credited cinematographer Bianca Cline has honored her late colleague by adhering to the details and lighting choices left behind in Hutchins’ notes. 

As a result, the footage is not just impressively seamless, but also beautiful throughout. The film’s digital gloss dovetails with the rustic elementalism of its genre, whereas so many other recent Westerns have forced those two aesthetics into direct confrontation with each other. Clunky as “Rust” can be when its script tries to navigate how the regrets of one generation might seed the hopes of another, the film’s photography creates a nuanced conversation between the heartbreak of the past and the promise of the future. In this case, that promise will remain eternally unfulfilled.

“Some things in this life you can’t get back, I reckon,” Harland laments. It’s the one truth that “Rust” conveys all too well. 

“Rust” is now playing in theaters and on VOD.