Rebuilding review – Josh O’Connor is a stoic rancher in sensitive, if slight, wildfire drama | Sundance 2025

The difficult question of how one truly recovers from the devastating loss that a wildfire can bring is one that more and more are confronting. It’s been a horrifying year for too many in California, land and lives lost, the unimaginable process of figuring out what comes next now on the horizon. In the writer-director Max Walker-Silverman’s quiet and timely sophomore film Rebuilding, he offers some insight into how this looks and feels, told through the eyes of Josh O’Connor’s stoic rancher.

The British actor, coming off his biggest role in Luca Guadagnino’s teasing tennis drama Challengers, plays Dusty, a Colorado man who has just lost almost everything, acres of inherited land gone in an instant. We meet him not long after as he finds himself unmoored, unsure of what his life looks like now, moving to a pokey trailer paid for by rapidly decreasing government funds, forced back into a world he had mostly turned his back on. That world includes his ex-wife Ruby (The White Lotus’s excellent and underused Meghann Fahy) and young daughter Callie Rose (the promising Australian actor Lily LaTorre), who he now has to parent in a way we assume he hasn’t for a while. One of the film’s more effective moments sees Ruby express frustration over how, as a mostly absent father, Dusty can still do no wrong in his child’s mind, a tough pill to swallow for a mother who has taken on the harder day-to-day weight of true parenting. Walker-Silverman, who enjoyed a low-key Sundance hit back in 2022 with the delicate romance A Love Song, tells stories in the smallest of touches, spare dialogue deprioritised over stunning scenery.

Part of Rebuilding involves Dusty’s wrestle with how to accept help, the character often resembling the parody of a strong and silent big-screen cowboy. It’s something the film is very aware of, with Ruby reminding him that his real name is the far less cinematic Thomas. O’Connor is familiar with this mode, having played a similarly reserved man of nature in Francis Lee’s involving gay romance God’s Own Country back in 2017. There’s far less for him to chew on here but, despite a not always convincing accent, he acquits himself well, an actor who can do a lot with very little, relying on the tiny details of his unusual face to express emotions the script mostly chooses to repress.

There’s a new community for Dusty, among those who are also displaced, also living in trailers, a makeshift village of people tied together by loss (one that also includes True Detective’s Kali Reis), figuring out how to gain some control over a life that has just shown that you ultimately have very little. Resistance for him is brief and futile as he starts to find his way back into the world.

Like many a Sundance movie, Rebuilding is a hushed and handsomely made drama reliant on the overwhelm of nature to fill in the many gaps. It has slightly more substance and refreshingly less forced quirkiness than A Love Song, which was almost too thin and would surely not have worked without the transfixing face of Dale Dickey, but it’s another film that’s sometimes a little underwritten to work as well as it could. Walker-Silverman’s characters need not speak in clumsily unreal, exposition-swamped terms but there’s a dearth of real, distinctive detail, some of his pages a little too blank. This lightness then makes the final act feel almost too plotted, as the sudden death of a minor character is quickly followed by a sweet if unrealistically easy save-the-day act of kindness, too much after too little.

There are still scenes, even without the shadow of recent events, that offer an effective pang of poignancy, Walker-Silverman and O’Connor’s heavy-lifting performance showing us how jarring and hopeless the aftermath can feel. It’s a story about how to maintain one’s deep love for nature even when you’ve just been shown how awful and violent and unpredictable it can be. Recovery is shown to be a tough, jagged process and while Rebuilding might not offer much in the way of specifics, it offers a wealth of hope which might be enough for now.