''To Dust'' is a 2018 American
comedy-drama
Comedy drama, also known by the portmanteau ''dramedy'', is a genre of dramatic works that combines elements of comedy and drama. The modern, scripted-television examples tend to have more humorous bits than simple comic relief seen in a typical ...
film directed by Shawn Snyder and starring
Géza Röhrig
Géza Röhrig ( hu, Röhrig Géza, ; May 11, 1967) is a Hungarian actor and poet. He is best known for his role in the 2015 film ''Son of Saul'', which won the Grand Prix at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Lang ...
and
Matthew Broderick
Matthew Broderick (born March 21, 1962) is an American actor. His roles include the Golden Globe-nominated portrayal of the title character in ''Ferris Bueller's Day Off'' (1986), the voice of adult Simba in Disney's ''The Lion King'' (1994), ...
, Leo Heller and Sammy Voit. It was produced by
Emily Mortimer
Emily Kathleen Anne Mortimer (born 6 October 1971) is a British-American actress. She began acting in stage productions and has since appeared in several film and television roles. In 2003, she won an Independent Spirit Award for her performanc ...
,
Alessandro Nivola
Alessandro Antine Nivola (born June 28, 1972) is an American actor. He has been nominated for a Tony Award and an Independent Spirit Award and has won a Screen Actors Guild Award, a British Independent Film Award (BIFA), and the Best Actor Award ...
and
Ron Perlman
Ronald Perlman (born April 13, 1950) is an American actor. His credits include the roles of Amoukar in ''Quest for Fire'' (1981), Salvatore in ''The Name of the Rose'' (1986), Vincent in the television series ''Beauty and the Beast'' (1987–199 ...
. The film premiered at the
Tribeca Film Festival
The Tribeca Festival is an annual film festival organized by TriBeCa Productions, Tribeca Productions. It takes place each spring in New York City, showcasing a diverse selection of film, episodic, talks, music, games, art, and immersive progra ...
on 22 April 2018 followed by screenings at the
San Francisco Jewish Film Festival
San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is the oldest Jewish film festival in the world, and currently the largest with a 2016 attendance figure of 40,000 at screenings in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San Rafael, and Palo Alto. The three-week summe ...
and the
Hamptons International Film Festival
The Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF) is an international film festival founded in 1992, by Joyce Robinson. The festival has since taken place every year in East Hampton, New York. It is usually an annual five-day event in mid-October a ...
.
Plot
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 comes to a rabbi—but then forms an unlikely partnership with a professor of biology.
Cast
*
Géza Röhrig
Géza Röhrig ( hu, Röhrig Géza, ; May 11, 1967) is a Hungarian actor and poet. He is best known for his role in the 2015 film ''Son of Saul'', which won the Grand Prix at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Lang ...
as Shmuel
*
Sammy Voit as Naftali
*
Matthew Broderick
Matthew Broderick (born March 21, 1962) is an American actor. His roles include the Golden Globe-nominated portrayal of the title character in ''Ferris Bueller's Day Off'' (1986), the voice of adult Simba in Disney's ''The Lion King'' (1994), ...
as Albert
*Leo Heller as Noam
*Janet Sarno as Faigy
*
Stephanie Kurtzuba
Stephanie Kurtzuba (born March 20, 1972) is an American film, television, and theater actress. She is best known for her roles in the films '' The Wolf of Wall Street'' (2013), ''Annie'' (2014), and ''The Irishman'' (2019), and on television in a ...
as Receptionist
*Ben Hammer as Rebbe
*Larry Owens as Stanley
*
Bern Cohen
Bern Cohen (New York City, 1949)Mandy Actors
is an American actor and educator. He spent many years in the New ...
as Reb Goshen
*Aaron Raskin as Sender
*Jill Marie Lawrence as Judy
*Joseph Siprut as Undertaker
*Zalman Raskin as Brother-in-Law
*Sarah Jes Austell as Lab Receptionist
*Natalie Carter as Security Guard
*Marceline Hugot as Carol
*Isabelle Phillips as Shprintzel
Accolade
The film won the Narrative Audience Award at the 2018
Tribeca Film Festival
The Tribeca Festival is an annual film festival organized by TriBeCa Productions, Tribeca Productions. It takes place each spring in New York City, showcasing a diverse selection of film, episodic, talks, music, games, art, and immersive progra ...
.
Reception
On
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
, the film has an approval rating of based on reviews, with an average rating of . The site's critical consensus reads: "Thematically ambitious and tonally audacious, ''To Dust'' tackles universally relatable topics in a bracingly original way."
Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...
, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 66 out of 100 based on 16 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Richard Roeper
Richard E. Roeper (born October 17, 1959) is an American columnist and film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times''. He co-hosted the television series '' At the Movies'' with Roger Ebert from 2000 to 2008, serving as the late Gene Siskel's success ...
of the ''
Chicago Sun-Times
The ''Chicago Sun-Times'' is a daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Since 2022, it is the flagship paper of Chicago Public Media, and has the second largest circulation among Chicago newspapers, after the ''Chicago T ...
'' 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." Classic buddy movie material. Robert Adele of the ''
Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
'' noted "The movie could use a little more energy — this is
Paul Mazursky
Irwin Lawrence "Paul" Mazursky (April 25, 1930 – June 30, 2014) was an American film director, screenwriter, and actor. Known for his dramatic comedies that often dealt with modern social issues, he was nominated for five Academy Awards: three t ...
territory, after all, not
Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky ( rus, Андрей Арсеньевич Тарковский, p=ɐnˈdrʲej ɐrˈsʲenʲjɪvʲɪtɕ tɐrˈkofskʲɪj; 4 April 1932 – 29 December 1986) was a Russian filmmaker. Widely considered one of the greates ...
— but in its sick-but-sweet attempt to reclaim grief from the trappings of tradition, ''To Dust'' is its own well-measured godsend."
Vulture
A vulture is a bird of prey that scavenges on carrion. There are 23 extant species of vulture (including Condors). Old World vultures include 16 living species native to Europe, Africa, and Asia; New World vultures are restricted to North and ...
'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."
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."
References
External links
*
*
* {{allmovie, 713352
2018 films
American comedy-drama films
Dybbuks in film
Films about Jews and Judaism
2010s English-language films
2010s American films