Director - Joel Souza
Cast - Alec Baldwin, Josh Hopkins, Patrick Scott McDermott, Frances Fisher, Travis Fimmel
Run Time – 140 Minutes
 
There’s no easy way to sit down with Rust. You don’t just “watch” this film — you arrive at it, like walking into a room where something terrible happened. The lights are still on. The chairs are still warm. And someone, awkwardly, is trying to go ahead with the party.
 
Joel Souza’s Rust is a Western — at least, it cosplays as one. There are dusty plains, bounty hunters with Bible verses on their lips, and standoffs lit like oil paintings. Alec Baldwin, looking like a hamlet sheriff who’s seen God and told Him to mind His business, plays Harland Rust — outlaw, grandfather, and the film’s reluctant moral compass. But the movie isn’t really about gunfights or redemption. It’s about trying to tell a story while an enormous, invisible weight presses down on every frame.
 
Yes, that weight is the tragedy. The accidental on-set shooting that claimed the life of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins is inextricable from the film’s DNA. It’s not fair to the cast or crew, but it is reality. The movie carries it like a limp. Even when Rust finds its rhythm — in the sepia glow of a sunset, or the creak of saddle leather under a starry sky — you feel it. Not quite a ghost in the machine, more like a bruise under the surface.
 
The plot is as worn as a saloon floorboard: a boy in trouble, a grizzled outlaw with a heart behind his grit, a posse in pursuit, and miles of desert in between. Patrick Scott McDermott plays young Lucas, a scowling boy who commits a murder and finds himself on the gallows’ shortlist. Baldwin’s Rust busts him out, and together they ride — not toward salvation exactly, but away from a justice system built for hangin’ and not for nuance.
 
There’s a tenderness lurking here, somewhere between Baldwin’s over-cultivated cowboy drawl and McDermott’s moody teen angst. But like many things in Rust, it never quite makes it to the surface. The relationship is gestured at, like a telegram from a screenwriting manual: insert grandfatherly bond here. It’s sentimental scaffolding with no emotional drywall.
 
The chase element — pursued by a morally murky marshal (Josh Hopkins) and a scripture-slinging bounty hunter (Travis Fimmel, doing a rural Joker impression) — is less high-stakes than it is high-saddle. The action unfolds not in galloping urgency but in a kind of existential mosey. Think The Straight Story with more rifles and fewer tractors.
 
Where Rust does shine, and I mean literally, is in its cinematography. Halyna Hutchins’ eye, along with additional photography by Bianca Cline, frames the West not as a playground of violence but as a canvas of melancholy. Shadows fall like confessions. The landscape breathes. There are moments — fleeting, beautiful moments — where the film looks like it remembers what it could’ve been. It’s the rare Western that feels haunted in a way that has nothing to do with ghosts.
 
But then it speaks. Or rather, the characters do. And suddenly we’re back in the realm of underwritten dialogue, exposition that clunks like spurs on tile, and a plot that unfolds more out of obligation than momentum. The emotional beats hit like they’re being read off a recipe card in dim lighting. It’s sincere, but it’s shallow — a postcard from a place that once meant something.
 
Watching Rust is less like enjoying a story and more like participating in a cinematic séance. The movie wants to stand on its own legs, but those legs are attached to an elephant in the room. And while it’s not bad — it’s competently made, occasionally striking, and at times even moving — it’s never free. Not from its story. Not from its backstory. Not from our knowledge of what it cost to make.
 
Final Verdict: Rust isn’t a disaster, but it is a dilemma. A film that exists because it had to be finished, but never quite earns the right to exist beyond its context. It’s the kind of movie that leaves you quiet afterward — not because it moved you, but because you're not quite sure how to feel.