To Dust is a 2018 American comedy-drama film directed by Shawn Snyder (in his feature directorial debut), who co-wrote the screenplay with Jason Begue. It stars Géza Röhrig and Matthew Broderick, with Janet Sarno, Ben Hammer, Leo Heller, Sammy Voit, and Marceline Hugot in supporting roles. It follows a Hasidic cantor who, distraught by the untimely death of his wife, struggles to find religious solace.
American Hasidic Jew, Shmuel, loses his beloved wife, Rivka, to cancer. Now he lives with his mother, two sons, and a terrible longing. While his mother advises Shmuel to "move on" and marry again, the children think that a dibbuk, the spirit of Rivka, has moved into their father. Longing and excitement drive Shmuel to look for answers to unexpected questions. What worries him most is the thought of what happens to his beloved wife's body after burial and how quickly she turns to dust. To find answers and religious solace, Shmuel initially approaches a rabbi, but then forms an unlikely partnership with a professor of biology.
In 2015, the Tisch School of the Arts' $100,000 Sloan First Feature Film Prize was awarded to graduate student Shawn Snyder to produce his screenplay, To Dust.[3] Snyder himself called the film a dark comedy,[4] and talked about how his Reform Judaism background informed the story:
I have an ongoing journey with my Judaism that waxes and wanes. As a spiritual seeker myself, the movie is about how to find our own personal meanings and build our own rituals around it. That lifelong and continuing journey is largely what the film is about, our right to grieve, to find meaning in that loss, and to have conversations with the cultures we come from.[5]
To Dust was produced by Ron Perlman and Josh Crook's Wing and a Prayer Pictures, Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola's King Bee Productions, and Scott Floyd Lochmus.[6] The original music was composed by Ariel Marx.[7]
Release
To Dust had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 22, 2018.[8] In June 2018, Good Deed Entertainment acquired U.S distribution rights to the film.[6] It was then released in select theaters on February 8, 2019.[9]
Reception
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 89% of 47 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.1/10. The website's consensus reads: "Thematically ambitious and tonally audacious, To Dust tackles universally relatable topics in a bracingly original way."[10]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 66 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[11]
Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times commented "No doubt the material will offend some, given the nature of the storyline. And yet beneath the sometimes grisly visuals and the pitch-black humor and the general weirdness, this is the story of two men with precious little in common who become friends against all odds and help one another find a little peace in life."[12] Classic buddy movie material. Robert Adele of the Los Angeles Times noted "The movie could use a little more energy — this is Paul Mazursky territory, after all, not Andrei Tarkovsky — but in its sick-but-sweet attempt to reclaim grief from the trappings of tradition, To Dust is its own well-measured godsend."[13]Vulture's David Edelstein wrote that "To Dust is occasionally unintentionally cringe-inducing. The portrait of Shmuel will probably offend Orthodox Jews, despite — or perhaps because of — his continuous exclamations that everything he's doing is 'not Jewish.' The spirit of inquiry is extremely Jewish, but different communities have different levels of tolerance for going outside the lines."[14]
Mark Dujsik of RogerEbert.com gave the film three stars out of four, and wrote: "Religion can provide some solace, but it can also complicate matters. Science can explain the natural processes, but even then, it cannot account for every detail in every situation. To Dust is about those contradictions and, in the end, about the ultimate one: that, to some questions, the only logical and spiritual answer is that there isn't one—except whatever we make of it."[15]
^Snyder, Shawn (December 1, 2015). "Meet the Filmmaker: Shawn Snyder". Sloan Science & Film (Interview). Interviewed by Sonia Shechet Epstein. Archived from the original on February 27, 2024. Retrieved August 16, 2024.
