Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Bleecker Street opens “Rebuilding” on November 14.
Loath as I am to label anything as “the movie people need right now,” it’s hard to think of Max Walker-Silverman’s “Rebuilding” in any other terms at the moment. A spare but deeply felt sketch of a drama about a divorced Colorado rancher (a hangdog Josh O’Connor) trying to make sense of what he’s got left in the wake of a devastating wildfire, the story is every bit as gentle as the rest of Walker-Silverman’s work (i.e. 2022’s “A Love Song”), and yet still honest enough to reckon with the heartache of losing one’s home. In fact, it’s only because “Rebuilding” is so raw in its pain that it’s able to resolve into such an effectively comforting balm; the film begins with generations of memory smoldering into 1,000 acres of scorched earth, and from the ashes rescues a new foundation on which its characters might credibly be able to create the next iteration of their lives.
The rancher is a man called Dusty — at least, that’s what he’s taken to calling himself. Makes him feel like more of a cowboy than “Thomas,” I guess. His grandparents built the cattle ranch where he lived before the fires, the one with the great view and the bright blue barn smack in the middle. There was a time when Dusty’s ex-wife Ruby (Meghann Fahy) and their young daughter Callie-Rose (Australian newcomer Lily LaTorre, a wonderful find) lived there too, but that’s been over for a while now.
Ruby claims that he “didn’t apply himself,” but I suspect that Dusty just didn’t apply himself enough to her and Callie-Rose; to judge by the silent anguish that sinks across O’Connor’s face at the cattle auction that opens the film, Dusty certainly seems to have been invested in his livestock. You can all but see the life seeping out of him — or a life seeping out of him, anyway. “Can you even be a cowboy without cows?,” someone asks. Dusty isn’t so sure.
Even worse: He doesn’t have the slightest clue what else he might be. Dusty is so married to a certain image of himself that his first thought after the fire is to take a part-time ranching job a few states away. Ruby and Callie-Rose live the next town over from where Dusty’s ranch once stood, but it seems like being close to his daughter isn’t a crucial part of his self-identity — or to the family legacy he’s dedicated himself to continuing.
That will gradually begin to change as Dusty mourns what he’s lost forever and takes stock of what he’s still got left. “You get what you get” is a common refrain, a motto of sorts for Ruby’s live-in mother (Amy Madigan, lovely in a role that proves a bit too convenient for such a naturalistic script), and Dusty spends most of this movie trying to understand his portion.
It doesn’t come easy to him. He moves into a trailer park on a FEMA campsite with roughly a dozen other people who lost their houses in the fire (some of whom lost a lot more than that), and yet none of Dusty’s new neighbors seem quite as paralyzed by the whole ordeal. Not even Mila (an eminently believable Kali Reis), whose husband ran into the flames and never came out.
Don’t hold your breath for him to show up at a pivotal moment — it’s clear from the opening twangs of Jake Xerxes Fussell’s tender acoustic score that “Rebuilding” won’t be as action-packed as its title implies. Some movies are verbs; this one is self-evidently a noun. Walker-Silverman prefers to express his characters through texture rather than incident, and while it would be patently false to say that nothing “happens” in his latest feature (not in a film where we repeatedly get to see Josh O’Connor work as a crossing guard for buffalo!), the story it tells is best defined by what doesn’t.
Dusty doesn’t get a loan to rebuild the ranch, as the land won’t be farmable for at least the next 10 years. He doesn’t interfere with Ruby’s current relationship, or do anything to rewind the clock back to when they were married. He doesn’t even unpack the cardboard boxes in his trailer, as he just can’t bring himself to accept that all of this isn’t reversible somehow. Home is supposed to be forever — that’s what makes it home. Even if you move, it’s supposed to still be there.
But as Dusty begins to spend more time with Callie-Rose — often sitting in the parking lot of the local library so they can siphon its wifi signal — and forging generous friendships with the rest of the displaced people in the trailer park (played by a warm and memorable collection of non-professional actors, including Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings musician Binky Griptite), “Rebuilding” accrues a lasting power from all of the impermanence that it collects along the way. Even the film’s most schematic moments make it feel as though Walker-Silverman is simply unearthing something that was already there.
Madigan’s character spends most of her time reminding Dusty of what he’s forgotten, and to introduce trenchant details he may not have known. It’s because of her that Dusty has reason to reflect on his grandparents, who only created the “forever home” he’s so determined to rebuild because they left Ireland and started over themselves. And, in a particularly egregious scene that manages to survive on the strength of its thematic weight, it’s because of her that Dusty is convinced that memory can be a legacy all its own — one that can be re-seeded even when it feels like nothing else will ever take root again.
“Rebuilding” contains a number of crucial moments that might seem especially contrived in a film where everything else is so unforced, but O’Connor’s implosive performance helps keep everything grounded to the earth. While Fahy is tasked with most of the capital “A” Acting here (a task she pulls off without a false note), O’Connor can be found in virtually every frame, often staring at the dirt or squinting at the horizon. There are times when it feels like Dusty is little more than a cowboy hat in search of a character, but O’Connor’s marble-mouthed uncertainty reflects Dusty’s resistance to change. It’s as if the guy is so unwilling to imagine a different future than the one he first envisioned that he can’t even get through a sentence if he doesn’t have the whole thing mapped out in advance.
O’Connor can do more with a slight shake of his head than some actors could with an entire Shakespearean monologue, and “Rebuilding” is never more nuanced or humane than when you can feel Dusty retreating from Mila and the other kind souls in the FEMA park, afraid that every step he took forward would take him that much further away from going back.
But Callie-Rose can’t help but push against that idea, if only because raising a child — if we can call it that — is its own form of rebuilding. And while Dusty isn’t the type to admit this out loud, watching his daughter make new friends and lose precious things of her own inevitably has a profound effect on him.
The fact is that life is nothing more than a constant series of endings and beginnings; change is the only constant, cliched as that might sound, and while “Rebuilding” stops well short of asking its characters to be grateful for their misfortune, a lasting sense of hope emerges from the opportunity they’re given to re-imagine what home could mean.
How do you build something that lasts in a world where climate change can, has, and will continue to wipe centuries of history right off the map? When the threat of another tragic wildfire is not a matter of “if,” but “when?” “It’s funny,” someone says, “the things you pack and the things you leave.” This quietly affecting little movie finds real poignancy in paying attention to what those things are, and — ultimately — in forging them together so that someone else might have the gift of mourning these ruins one day.
Grade: B+
“Rebuilding” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Bleecker Street opens the film Friday, November 14.
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