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.
