Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna
Directed by Rachel Mason
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour and 31 minutes
Premieres on Hulu March 11

by Kate Beach, Staff Writer

When I mentioned I was reviewing Last Take, a friend sighed. “What more is there to that story?” he asked. I admittedly wondered that myself. Since the tragic and entirely preventable death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust (dir. Joel Souza, 2024), the coverage of the incident was relentless and mostly focused on Alec Baldwin, armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed, and the conditions on set that may have caused the death of Hutchins and injury of Rust director Souza. Little of the breathless talk following the incident centered Hutchins herself. Fortunately, director Rachel Mason, a friend of Hutchins, has something to say about that.

Mason’s documentary–made at the request of Hutchins’s husband–aims to turn the spotlight towards Hutchins, her life and career, and her dreams for her art. A vast array of subjects are interviewed, from cast and crew of Rust to industry experts to members of Hutchins’s family. The question of how is asked over and over: how could this happen? How could a live round make it onto the set at all, let alone into a gun in the hands of an actor? How could this production fall so short of basic safety protocols that six live bullets were on set for days, essentially creating a game of Russian roulette every time someone picked up a gun?

Mason can’t answer those questions, but she can tell the story of a production plagued by safety issues, including several negligent discharges of weapons mere days before Hutchins’s death. She intersperses her interviews with a trove of evidence, employing text messages, social media posts, police body cameras and OSHA interviews, and footage from the shoot itself, including the day of the incident. From a camera team walk off to damning text messages denying more weapons training time for actors, it’s clear that a long chain of failures resulted in the shooting of Hutchins and Souza. Mason builds a timeline and covers the so-called “disharmony” on set between the production and camera team and does a good job of showing the audience the path that led to Hutchins and Souza standing directly behind the camera, rather than watching from the safety of monitors. She then follows her subjects through the aftermath of that horrific day, through criminal and civil proceedings, the media frenzy, and the eventual decision to complete filming Rust as a tribute to Hutchins.

Mason is a skilled filmmaker; Last Take follows other Mason documentary projects like HBO’s recent An Update on Our Family (2025) and the fascinating Circus of Books (2019), about the gay bookstore her parents ran in San Francisco for over thirty years. She is careful and considerate of her subjects, and the love she felt for Hutchins comes through easily. In fact, the love everyone had for her shines throughout the film. It’s nice to see Hutchins in motion, doing her job, and touching to hear her colleagues, friends, and family reflect on who she was. Chyrons identifying interview subjects use their first names, creating familiarity, and Mason occasionally jumps in to comment on or react to something a subject has said.

The goal of Last Take, outside of finally centering Hutchins in the story of her own life and death, is reinforcing the necessity of collaboration in filmmaking. Hutchins herself says, “Cinematography is something you don’t do by yourself…there is no individual authorship.” In describing the feeling of bringing a script you wrote to life with a full crew, Souza says, “Now, it’s everybody’s movie, you have a better version of it because everybody brought themselves to it.” When all those people come together, bringing their individual talents to a work larger than themselves, the magic of film is made. In Last Take: The Story of Halyna, Mason shows just how easily these collaborations can turn tragic.

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