Dust Saint
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Director: Rose Glass
Writer: Holden Abbott
Cast: Paul Dano, Jessie Buckley, Nell Fisher, John Hawkes
Plot: A stark desert. Bleached bones in the sand. A lone wagon creaks across the empty horizon, painted with the words: HOLY REMEDIES — FAITH, FIRE, AND FORMULA.
Behind the reins sits Elias Mercy (Paul Dano), wiry, sunburnt, and dressed like a traveling preacher whose clothes have seen better days. He hums a broken hymn to himself. His eyes, wide and fragile, flicker with a hint of madness.
Elias rolls into Calico Pass, a nearly abandoned mining town choking on dust. The well is dry. The church collapsed. A few gaunt souls watch him from shaded porches like ghosts. A sign nailed to a post reads: “IN GOD WE STILL TRUST — SOMEHOW.”
At the saloon, Elias is eyed warily. He performs his usual pitch — claims to have been “sent by the Lord to revive the soul of this place.” He hands out bottles of brown tonic, speaks with warmth and poetry. The barkeep spits on the floor. “We’ve seen your type.” But one woman, Clara Halloway (Jessie Buckley), quietly buys a bottle.
That night, Elias sets up a tent revival outside the burned-down church. He preaches into the dark, voice trembling but rising like fire. A few people drift in, drawn by something in his cadence — a sadness that feels holy.
Elias visits townsfolk one by one. He fixes a broken fence, blesses a dying mule, comforts a sick child with water and a touch. All sleight of hand — practiced tricks from years on the road — but the people want to believe.
A thunderstorm gathers far off in the desert. He calls a meeting that night: “I have been sent to bring rain.” People gather, desperate. He rants in tongues. People weep. And then — as if on cue — it rains.
Just a burst. But it’s enough. The crowd erupts.
Elias collapses behind his tent, panicked, gasping. He hadn’t expected it. “It’s coincidence,” he mutters. “Coincidence.”
But Clara comes to him, soaked and smiling, kneels. “I believe you were sent.”
He’s too shaken to speak.
Over the next weeks, Elias becomes the town’s reluctant shepherd. The sheriff, Malrick (John Hawkes), an old, limping man with failing lungs, warns him: “You get one miracle. Don’t press your luck.”
Elias organizes the rebuilding of the church. Sermons swell in size. Clara teaches hymns to the children. Donations pile up. He blesses livestock, heals stomachaches with sugar water. People whisper his name with reverence.
One night, Elias stands alone at the well. He hears something below — whispers, not wind. When he looks down, the water’s returned.
He doesn’t tell anyone.
Elias begins to dream of a figure made of ash and flame, standing on the hill, watching the town. It never speaks. Just stares. Its face is hollow — no eyes, just black flame.
He wakes trembling. Begins to drink his own tonic.
At a sermon, a man collapses from a seizure. Elias kneels, touches him, prays — it’s a spectacle. The man convulses, then stops. Moments later, he opens his eyes and begins to sing. The crowd roars.
Clara weeps with joy. Elias shakes with fear.
Later that night, Elias vomits behind the chapel. “I didn’t do anything,” he whispers to himself.
The next morning, a quiet, withdrawn orphan girl, age 12, begins to follow Elias. She doesn’t speak. Watches him with calm, unblinking eyes. She’s everywhere — outside his tent, behind the pulpit, in the hills.
Elias gives her a name — Hope. She never repeats it, but she doesn’t object.
One day, she hands him a small notebook. Inside: drawings of the burning man. Identical to Elias’s dream. On the last page: “He walks with you.” Elias burns the notebook.
The town buries Old Caleb Drury, a prospector who’d lost his legs in a cave-in a decade earlier and had taken to preaching apocalypse with a whiskey bottle in hand. Three days after his funeral, children whisper they saw him “walking the hills on new legs.”
Elias dismisses it at first, chalking it up to grief hallucinations or childish fancy. But more townspeople come forward, swearing they saw Caleb — clothed in white, standing in the ravine behind the chapel. Some say he looked joyful. Others say he wept blood.
Sheriff Malrick has the grave dug up. The coffin is open, the body gone. No signs of digging.
A fire breaks out in the saloon that night. No one is hurt, but people take it as a sign. Elias, now plagued by waking visions and insomniac tremors, gives a sermon in which he tries to redirect their faith: “Miracles may comfort, but they do not speak. And they do not save.”
But it’s no use. His words only deepen their belief. “He doubts himself — how humble he is,” Clara says with a reverent smile.
In the back of the crowd, the orphan girl Hope watches him silently, clutching a charred bible missing its cover.
Clara is a widow of three years. Her husband was a miner crushed in a collapse — the same collapse Elias claimed had been “foreseen” in a dream, though privately he admitted he never saw a thing.
Clara has latched onto Elias not as a romantic partner but as a holy purpose. She cooks for him, washes his clothes, arranges his sermons. She reads from scripture with quiet conviction and speaks often of her husband, who she believes is “watching through Elias’s eyes.”
One night, she invites Elias to dinner. The food is rich, almost ceremonial. As he eats, Clara stares at him with unsettling calm.
“You’re shaking,” she says.
“I haven’t slept,” he replies.
“Then rest. Let the Lord carry your burden.”
She kisses his forehead. Then his mouth. Elias begins to protest, but Clara shushes him gently. The moment turns intimate, but not sensual — it feels like ritual. As they lie together in candlelight, Clara whispers, “We’re remaking the world. You and me.”
Elias weeps quietly.
The next day, Hope is gone. No one saw her leave. No one seems terribly concerned.
Elias panics. He searches her usual haunts — the schoolhouse ruins, the prayer rocks behind the well, the burned oak tree. He finds instead a trail of sketches pinned to fence posts and tree bark, drawn in soot and chalk: images of the burning man.
He follows the trail into the hills. The drawings grow stranger — the burning man flanked by weeping animals, the church levitating, Elias depicted with flames bursting from his eyes. Finally, he sees her: Hope, standing on a ledge, looking out over Calico Pass.
“Hope!” he calls.
She turns. Smiles. Then walks behind a boulder and vanishes.
Elias chases after her — but finds only a makeshift shrine: bones, feathers, and her charred bible, now open to blank pages. A strange wind picks up. In the distance, on a ridge across the valley, the burning man appears. Still, silent. Watching.
Elias collapses. “What do you want?” he shouts. The wind howls. The figure doesn’t move.
He returns to town, hollow-eyed.
Elias stumbles into the church and finds Sheriff Malrick waiting, drunk and holding a shotgun.
“I should’ve run you out the day you arrived,” Malrick says. “You want to see God, I’ll put you close.”
Malrick confesses he’s dying — likely has weeks. He’s not afraid of death, but he’s afraid of what the town’s become. “They’re not people anymore, Elias. They’re moths, and you’re the fire.”
Elias breaks. He confesses everything: the fake tonics, the prison record, the staged healings, the money he skimmed from donations. He begs Malrick to kill him — to end the lie.
Malrick doesn’t shoot. He just spits. “You think death’s punishment? You ain’t even begun to suffer.”
He walks away.
Elias goes to the bell tower and rings the church bell wildly in the middle of the night. The town gathers. He screams the truth. “I’m a liar! A criminal! I don’t deserve your faith!”
They stare in silence. Clara steps forward. “Even Christ wept in the garden,” she says. “Your doubt makes you holy.”
They kneel. One by one.
Elias falls to his knees, sobbing.
Hope’s body is found nailed to a cross-shaped tree at the edge of the desert, arms outstretched. She is covered in strange markings, but her face is peaceful — as if asleep. No blood. No signs of struggle. Just ash where her feet touched the earth.
No one claims to have seen anything. Clara insists, “She was chosen.” The town agrees.
They carry her body to the church. Elias tries to stop them, but he is ignored. She is laid upon the altar.
That night, Elias stands over her, alone. He whispers a prayer, not to God, but to anyone listening.
At the next service, Elias stands barefoot in front of the crowd. His clothes are torn. He hasn’t eaten in days.
“I came here to lie,” he says. “I came here to survive. I sold you false hope because it was all I had. But this? This thing walking among us — it’s not hope. It’s not God. It’s hunger.”
He douses the pulpit in oil. Lights a match. Throws it.
The church bursts into flame. People scream — but do not run.
As the fire rises, the church begins to rebuild itself. Flames curl upward, shaping into wood. Beams reassemble midair. Smoke forms stained glass. It is impossible — and everyone sees it.
The altar glows. Hope’s body is gone.
Elias collapses in the aisle, eyes wide, mouth open. He whispers: “You were real.”
The congregation chants, “Mercy. Mercy. Mercy.”
Days pass. No one sees Elias. The town enters a near-trance state. No crime. No sickness. No speaking above a whisper.
Clara organizes a vigil. People come with candles, offerings, children dressed in white.
At dusk, Elias appears on the cliffside above the town, cloaked in a blood-red robe. He says nothing. Simply raises his arms.
Thunder rumbles.
He drops to his knees. He smiles. Not one of happiness. One of fear, anger. A tear drops down his cheek.
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