To Dust

To Dust is a 2018 American comedy-drama film directed by Shawn Snyder and starring Géza Röhrig and Matthew Broderick, Leo Heller, and Sammy Voit. It was produced by Emily Mortimer, Alessandro Nivola and Ron Perlman. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on 22 April 2018 followed by screenings at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

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 approaches a rabbi, but then forms an unlikely partnership with a professor of biology.

Cast

 * Géza Röhrig as Shmuel
 * Sammy Voit as Naftali
 * Matthew Broderick as Albert
 * Leo Heller as Noam
 * Janet Sarno as Faigy
 * Stephanie Kurtzuba as Receptionist
 * Ben Hammer as Rebbe
 * Larry Owens as Stanley
 * Bern Cohen 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 Shprintze

Reception
On Rotten Tomatoes, 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, 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 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." 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." 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."

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."

Accolades
The film won the Narrative Audience Award at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. The film was nominated for Best Screenplay at the 35th Independent Spirit Awards.