Part memorial, part procedural, Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna is director Rachel Mason’s tribute to her late friend, the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, and an investigation into the circumstances of her death. It’s hardly the first in the latter category: Alec Baldwin, who held the gun that took Hutchins’ life on the set of the movie Rust in October 2021, was among several parties criminally charged, and the case was exhaustively investigated by media outlets including the Los Angeles Times. (The charges against Baldwin were dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct; other crew members were convicted or pleaded no contest.) But the portrait of who Hutchins was in life remains a sketchy outline, not much more than the description one might chisel on a gravestone. Mason, who was asked to make the film by Hutchins’ husband the day after Hutchins died, began with the intent to make her more than the generic noun in an “Alec Baldwin shoots woman on set” headline. But as she revealed in a unusually candid post-screening Q&A last week, she was informed that there was more “commercial value” in a movie that focused on the incident itself.

If the movie, which is now streaming on Hulu, has a villain, it’s those same commercial incentives. There is plenty of blame to go around, much of it landing on Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, an inexperienced armorer who, seen in police bodycam footage taken immediately after the accident, seems far younger than her 24 years. Allowing live ammunition to be mixed with inert but real-looking dummy rounds, as she apparently did, is a shocking breach of on-set safety, defying ironclad industry protocols as well as basic common sense. But the reasons she was on set in the first place are so commonplace as to be mundane: cost-cutting and nepotism. Two experienced armorers had already quit as production was imminent, and Gutierrez-Reed was available and cheap. She had woefully little on-set experience, but her father, Thell Reed, is a legendary armorer who taught innumerable Hollywood stars how to spin their six-shooters on camera. Even then, her day rate was more than the low-budget production was willing to take on, so she worked most hours at lower pay, handling props. Gutierrez-Reed was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison, the harshest criminal penalty anyone involved has yet faced. But as Lorenzo Montoya, who investigated the working conditions on the Rust set for the federal government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, argues, she was “a symptom of an illness,” one that he characterizes as “plain indifference.”

Baldwin, who settled a civil suit from Hutchins’ family, isn’t interviewed in Last Take, although we see footage of him on set, including a moment when he rushes the crew to set up another take, and the horrible moment during his police interrogation when he learns Hutchins has died of her injuries. Rust’s producers, who are the subject of ongoing litigation, are likewise absent. But Mason sits with a wide range of people who knew and worked with Hutchins, who describe a workplace environment in which corners were repeatedly cut. The day before Hutchins’ death, her camera crew quit en masse, citing unsafe working conditions and singling out the frequency with which firearms had been accidentally discharged on set. But they didn’t inform Hutchins of their decision in advance, so she was compelled to take on several jobs herself, which is why she was standing next to the camera when Baldwin’s gun went off, rather than watching from a monitor several yards away. Director Joel Souza, who was wounded by the same bullet that killed Hutchins, shows how she favored “dynamic” compositions in which guns were pointed at an angle toward the camera lens, and it’s for us to draw the inference that searching for the perfect shot—a goal of every cinematographer, but especially one looking to boost her career with an eye-catching Western—might have put her in harm’s way. (At one point when they’re scouting outdoor locations, Souza suggests a good place for Hutchins to get “the old Thin Red Line shot.”)

Last Take remains agnostic about whether the gun that killed Halyna Hutchins simply went off in Alec Baldwin’s hand, as he told police, or whether he pulled the trigger, as a subsequent police investigation concluded he must have. (Several of the movie’s subjects cite what is often called the first rule of firearm safety—never point a weapon at something you don’t intend to shoot—and the camera rehearsal during which Hutchins was killed did not require him to fire the pistol.) And a closing title informs us that “questions remain” about how live ammunition ended up on set. So if you’re looking for a dramatic confession or shocking revelation, you won’t find it here. But Mason, who most recently directed the HBO docuseries An Update on Our Family, makes an implicit case that however egregious the misconduct and professional lapses on Rust’s set, they, like, Hutchins’ death, are symptoms of a larger problem, an industry struggling under the pressure to churn out premium-looking content at bargain prices, abiding by the fundamental rule that no matter what happens, you get the shot.

“When you work on a film set,” says Jonas Huerta, a member of Rust’s camera crew, “there’s an understanding that it’s gonna be hell.” As Montoya, the OSHA investigator, explains, a workplace accident is usually the last link in a chain of errors, not an isolated event, and singling out individuals doesn’t get to the root of the problem. As he puts it, “You can’t have a culture with three people.” Left unsaid, and underexplored by Last Take, is how the culture of a film shoot, built from the ground up each time out, is formed, and whose job it is to set the tone. The only person in the movie to openly accept their part in Hutchins’ death is assistant director David Halls, who pleaded guilty to negligent use of a deadly weapon and admits he failed to check the gun that killed her. (Baldwin, for his part, tells an interviewer he feels no responsibility.) Rust was eventually completed, with friends arguing that the best way to honor her was to ensure her work would be seen, and premiered in November at Cameraimage, a film festival dedicated to honoring cinematography. But the film still hasn’t been picked up for American distribution, and even in the documentary designed to honor her, she’s an intermittent presence. “I don’t know how you get justice from an accident,” one of Hutchins’ friends reflects. Last Take hasn’t figured it out either.