Set tragedy: Rust and Hashna’s story (last Take: Rust and the History of HalynaUnited States/2025). Address: Rachel Mason. Music: Chanell Chrichlow. Edición: Krystalline Armendariz. Duración: 90 minutes. Available in Disney+. Our opinion: very good.
“I don’t know how justice is done in an accident.” The dilemma expressed by the moved dressing room Terese davies summarizes the mood of those who were very close to Halyna Hutchins In their last work for cinema and they still wonder how that young and promising director of photography lost his life on October 21, 2021 due to circumstances that may never be fully clarified.
Davies’s testimony joins that of several members of the technical and acting team of Rustthe western produced and starring Alec Baldwin which joined the history of the tragedies in the filming sets from that moment. With the help of these voices, the newcomer documentary Disney+ Get a valuable and multiple purpose.
first of all, he pays tribute to the memory of Hutchins, and also to his brief professional career in the cinema. He tells so Rachel Masonits director, who was also a friend of the deceased, as revealed in the initial section. But at the same time it manages to summarize with certainty, precision and rigor the main aspects of the tragedy, the impact that the fact had between its main protagonists and the most important details of the arduous posterior framework: the investigation, the responsibilities and a judicial process that closed in an abrupt way.
As we know, in July 2024 a Court of New Mexico dismissed the accusations of involuntary homicide against Baldwin when their lawyers successfully demonstrated that some evidence had been deliberately manipulated. The Hollywood star was from the first moment in the center of the investigations because the projectile that killed Hutchins accidentally came out of a .45 Colt that manipulated during the trial of a shot inside a church.
Everyone believed, including the actor, that the bullets that were inside the weapon were of fogueo, but one of them turned out to be lead (real) and when he shot he killed the director of photography, who was very short distance, and continued his course until he crashed on the shoulder of the film director, Joel Souza. Hutchins died on his way to the hospital and Souza was able to recover after a few days of hospitalization.
The documentary was made at the request of Matthew Hutchins, Halyna’s widower, that discreetly chose to leave the picture and appear fleetingly only in file images during the funeral. That same moderation extends to the chronicle of the process, during which more than a very strong and very hard statement of the widower against Baldwin and the production of the film was known.
Baldwin, whose career in the cinema was never the same after the episode, either speaks outside of his testimonies extracted from the file. Some of them, arising from the security cameras that registered their first statements after the tragedy, make clear the accidental nature of what happened, but do not avoid some negligent circumstances that marked the actor’s behavior at that time.
The word (fundamental) of prosecutor Kari Morrissey leaves that behavior, but reinforces it even more in the case of Hannah Gutiérrez-Reedresponsible for the management of weapons used during the filming of the film, a responsibility that clearly was very large. This is well visible by the exact assembly of several images taken by cell phones when the first authorities arrive at the set and begin to look for explanations of what happened.
The documentary does not hesitate to leave the harmery behavior in the foreground, but without loading the inks. In any case, everything we see around it is equivalent to what researchers are observing. There and at all times we do not see anyone go out of a guilty, but to understand how an almost incomprehensible event could occur.
Mason looking for explanations. He wants to know what happened. To do so choose an unusual path in this type of documentaries, but very logical if we take into account from where the facts are seen. We said that the prosecutor’s testimony is very important, but more value still acquire the voices of the actors of Rust (Frances Fisher is the best known name) and from the technical team. Above all, the word of Dave Halls, first management assistant and, as such, head of the safety of the entire environment of the filming. His admission of responsibilities (he declared himself guilty and fulfilled a penalty of six months of probation) is shocking and revealing.
That look is the one that explains a final turn whose understanding could be uncomfortable. In a moment, after a twist that baffled more than one, the filming of Rust It resumed elsewhere and the movie could end. Meanwhile, the trial entered an almost definitive limbo due to procedural deficiencies. Although Gutierrez-Reed was sentenced to three years in effective prison for negligent behavior, it was never clear (and perhaps he never knows) who and when he mixed among the propsiles of use the lead bullet that Baldwin shot by accident and killed the director of photography.
“It is what Hutchins would have wanted,” actors and technicians told Chorus about the decision to complete the film in the middle of the pending verdict about what happened. He will also do it, from kyiv, the mother of the deceased. Meanwhile, the viewer is very clear about everything that happens on a very complex board exposed with a rare mixture of rigor and intellectual honesty.
The artistic, judicial and human scenario are exposed here without prejudices. Also Halyna’s memory, with the just brushstrokes of his life story. It may never get to a definitive and unappealable conclusion in the police case. But at the same time it is still curious that in the midst of so many accidental mitigators the observer can arrive with enough certainty to have a very approximate idea of what happened in New Mexico in October 2021.
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