Tribeca Review: Jon Snow With a Pornstache Deals Cocaine in 'Blood for Dust'

By Sara Clements | Film | June 21, 2023 |

By Sara Clements | Film | June 21, 2023 |

Rod Blackhurt’s neo-western crime thriller, Blood for Dust, trades blood for cocaine. In a cold America, two men find themselves on a dangerous path fueled by desperation in a thriller that doesn’t care about thrills as much as it does character — and it crafts characters very well. One man driven by greed, the other driven by love for his family -0 how far would you go for money? Blackhurst’s direction, combined with his writing alongside David Ebeltoft, gets to the deep heart of men.

Setting the tone quickly, Blood for Dust opens with a bang: a man shooting his brains out in his office. Blood splatters on a photo of him and his family, and blood drips down the walls. It’s a gruesome image and the result of a job gone wrong. While the film doesn’t go into too much detail, the job involved stealing from a sales company, and Cliff (Scoot McNairy) has carried the guilt of the aftermath ever since. It’s the early 1990s, and 17 months after his ex-friend/partner in crime took his own life, Cliff is still hustling in the sales game (at a different company now, of course). You wouldn’t suspect his previous babblings with crime from looking at him. He seems like an honest, meek guy doing an honest day’s work. A guy who goes home to his beautiful wife and attends church every Sunday. But you can only run from the past for so long before it catches up with you.

His work trying to sell defibrillators takes him all across the northwestern United States, where he eventually reunites with Ricky (Kit Harington owning his pornstache). Another ex-partner in crime and once a sales buddy of Cliff’s, Ricky is now a skeezy arms dealer selling drugs. He knows the scam of the sales business and was happy to scam the scammers on their last job. Despite the catastrophe 17 months ago, Ricky has come to sell Cliff on another way to make money. Since sales aren’t going well for him, it’s tempting. Ricky and Cliff are on different sides of the coin in their motivations for why they need this next big score. Ricky is simply an example of the greed of men, and Cliff is an example of the desperation that comes from the abuse of corporate America and the health care system on the working class. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Cliff gets in his unsuspecting station wagon to be a drug runner. However, Ricky’s greed eventually gets in the way, and it sends bullets flying.

Billed as a thriller, Blood for Dust is more character-focused than trying to build action sequences (although there are some great shootouts). It feels very meditative, with a lot happening under the surface, to perhaps the boredom of many. Both Ricky and Cliff are interesting, complicated characters. We spend most of the time with McNairy as Cliff, who carries a haunted look on his face as though the guilt for his past actions is eating at him. We also see how this guilt affects his actions throughout the film. Likewise, Ricky is a curious character, with Harington invoking a lot of mystery under that pornstache. We don’t learn as much about him as we do Cliff, but we learn a lot about his childhood and how it made him believe that life is built on selling lies, adding to his character’s motivations. The script is especially tight when it comes to characterization, and it’s able to get you in the headspace of someone like Cliff, who is a desperate man simply trying to do everything he can for his family.

A slow bang of drums carries the film like an army man’s funeral procession. It’s quite sullen and heavy in its eeriness, building both suspense and a memorable crime score. It’s also, surprisingly, one of the best shot films of the year as it elevates the snowy landscape or produces stunning shots like a bar mirror reflection of Ricky lighting up a cigarette. It may do the “slow” in slow burn a bit too well at times, but its strong Western genre elements build memorable character dynamics and atmosphere.

Blood for Dust had its world premiere at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival. General release TBA.