RUST - Mark Reviews Movies

Rust, Falling Forward Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 2, 2025

Rust emerges from avoidable on-set tragedy as an elegiac Western about senseless misfortune begetting more misery and death. In terms of plot, it is a fairly standard yarn, as two fugitives try to avoid capture and some lawmen hunt them. The material is undeniably elevated by its tone and visual sense of the stark beauty of the landscape, combined with the literal shadows of nature of its characters. Almost immediately, the movie serves as a final testament to the craft of late cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

Most modern Westerns don't look like this one, which uses natural light to hide the faces of men trying to hide themselves from the world and to turn familiar shots of cowboys on horseback into the purest silhouette of that iconic image. There's one shot, for example, of a bounty hunter arriving in a town, looking for a place to stay and to indulge one of his vices for the night, and the camera follows him down the main dirt thoroughfare, with torches on the buildings illuminating the shopfronts but keeping this hunter of men little more than the idea of a dark figure casting his presence upon this place.

When we're introduced to the story's anti-hero, too, he enters the door of the former home of the family lost or forgotten to him. Within that frame within the frame, there is only the man's stature, the outlines of his coat and hat, and the absence of any definable feature beyond what these broad details suggest.

Even in the light of day, there's a dimness to that glow, because this is not a time or place for brightness—only the dour feeling of a harsh life that, for these characters, is likely leading toward what they can only hope to be a quick, painless death. Our anti-hero explains that to his grandson, the teenage boy he's trying to save from an execution by hanging for the accidental killing of a man. As his miserable words of the two possible outcomes for a hanging death come, there is nothing but natural desolation beyond the grim faces of the grandfather's knowledge and the boy's gradual, horrified understanding of his fate.

Hutchins is responsible for most of this feeling. The fact that the movie is visually consistent throughout, even in scenes that would have filmed after Bianca Cline took over the role following Hutchins' death, shows that the late cinematographer had a complete plan in mind for the aesthetic of this material and did the work to ensure that it would remain that way. On some level, it's a minor marvel that this movie is as steady and coherent as it is, given the very public delays, necessary legal proceedings, and changes to both the cast and crew in the aftermath of what shouldn't have happened on this or any movie set. Whatever groundwork Hutchins laid for the look of the movie is surely a significant reason for that, too.

As for the movie beyond its appearance, it is a generally fine Western that's most notable in and of itself because of that mournful tone. It begins right away, as we meet orphaned brothers Lucas (Patrick Scott McDermott) and Jacob (Easton Malcolm), whose parents are buried on the farm they now run. The grave markers alone tell the boys' story as well as any spoken exposition, with the mother's a proper headstone and the father's a cobbled-together cross.

The boys don't have much, and they're losing more every day. Eventually, they get into a fight with a local bully of a kid, whose father demands that Lucas work for him. While trying to shoot a wolf, the boy accidentally shoots that man as he's coming to retrieve Lucas, and a judge sentences him to hang as soon as the nearby town can build gallows.

Lucas is broken out of jail by one Harland Rust (Alec Baldwin), a tough and notorious outlaw, who eventually reveals that he's the boy's maternal grandfather. Lucas never knew or even knew of the man because, as Harland puts it, he believed he was never any use to any of his family, and surely, that wouldn't change with a new generation of his family.

Writer/director Joel Souza takes his time with these two characters, as well as a broader cast of perhaps one too many characters on the side of the law. One of them is Wood Helm (Josh Hopkins), a U.S. Marshall whose son is dying and who takes up the manhunt—perhaps as much to avoid the inevitable grief as to actually fulfilling his professional obligation to the law. Another is Fenton "Preacher" Lang (Travis Fimmel), an eerie shell of a man who speaks of faith and Scripture but mainly to justify his ill deeds, as well as those of his ancestors, on this earth. The distinct idea of each of these characters is fascinating, but like most of the movie's narrative, they simply become part of the increasingly routine plot.

There's no telling what Rust was meant to be before and would have been if not for the tragedy of Hutchins' death. The movie arrives, though, as a tonally absorbing but intrinsically flawed and overly familiar piece of storytelling, as well as with an uncomfortable awareness of the violence within it. Whatever shortcomings the rest of the movie may have, the skill Hutchins' work within it is undeniable.

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