When Max Walker-Silverman’s “Rebuilding” made its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival this January, it hit home for so many who had flown in from Los Angeles. After the devastating Palisades and Altadena fires, here was a delicate drama about life after a wildfire that, for one rancher played by Josh O’Connor, seems to have claimed just about everything. Watch the trailer for “Rebuilding” below.”
As IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote in this B+ review of “Rebuilding” from the festival, “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.”
O’Connor’s character has endured his disaster in Colorado, where he’s been making a living off the land. Now, after the fire, the bank that holds the mortgage on his property won’t give him a loan to rebuild: He doesn’t have a house to borrow on to invest in the farm itself any longer, and no crops to borrow on to rebuild the house. The movie focuses on his tender relationship with his daughter Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre) and ex-wife Ruby (“The White Lotus” and “Drop” star Meghann Fahy) as he tries to put the pieces back together.
“O’Connor can be found in virtually every frame, often staring at the dirt or squinting at the horizon,” Ehrlich noted in his review. “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.”
Bleecker Street will release “Rebuilding” in theaters on November 14.