There are films that entertain. There are films that inspire. And then there’s Rust—a film so soaked in tragedy it can’t help but shiver under its own weight.
It was supposed to be a modest Western. A low-budget passion project, the kind Alec Baldwin could shoot in his sleep. But nothing about Rust will ever feel small again. Not after what happened on October 21, 2021.
Now, almost three years later, the movie has finally stumbled its way into the light. Limping into limited release, scarred and stitched together like a ghost of the story it once hoped to tell. The result? A cinematic séance.
You don’t watch Rust. You watch around it. Through it. Past the actors and into the shadows of what everyone knows but no one says. Halyna Hutchins—the cinematographer whose life was violently, senselessly taken on set—is everywhere and nowhere all at once. Her absence is a wound that never quite closes.
Baldwin plays an aging outlaw trying to save his grandson from the hangman’s noose. In another life, it might’ve been a career-reviving turn. But here? Every close-up, every twitch of his eye, feels haunted. There’s a heaviness behind the performance, like he’s dragging something unseen behind him. Maybe he is.
And the audience feels it. You can’t separate the art from the accident. The story unfolds, but the tragedy looms like a storm cloud over every frame. The New Mexico desert, wide and empty, only adds to the feeling that this isn’t just a film—it’s a tombstone.
To be fair, the film itself isn’t a trainwreck. It’s moody. Bleak. Occasionally beautiful. But the dialogue is thin, the pacing lags, and the tone stumbles between gritty realism and made-for-TV melodrama. It’s hard to tell if it was always this way, or if grief just seeped into the celluloid.
But none of that really matters. Not now.
What Rust has become is something far stranger than cinema. It’s a relic. A cursed artifact. A real-life tragedy etched into every dusty frame, daring you to look away. It doesn’t want your applause. It wants your reckoning.
Alec Baldwin’s future still hangs in the balance—criminal charges, civil lawsuits, public scorn—but Rust is finished. Released. Unleashed into the world. A broken film from a broken set.
And maybe that’s what makes it unforgettable.
Because in the end, Rust isn’t just a movie. It’s a ghost story. And like all good ghost stories, it lingers.
