The improbable has happened. Here’s a role where Josh O’Connor’s crumpled sweater charm feels ill-placed. He’s still reliably committed to his role in Max Walker-Silverman’s western drama Rebuilding, in which he plays the cowboyishly named cowboy Dusty, stuck in an emotional stasis after a wildfire wiped out his family’s Colorado ranch. But the genius of O’Connor’s work is that he plays gentility with a twist – sure, in Challengers’ (2024) tennis court ménage à trois, arrogance took the driver’s seat; but in Wake Up Dead Man (2025), La Chimera (2024), and The Mastermind (2025), he used his hangdog looks to disarm, to hide a blade or two up his sleeves.
Yet you could easily spend all of Rebuilding’s runtime looking for that edge: Dusty represents the cowboy as the idealised hermit monk, a man vaguely bemused by iPads and home internet, who’s mourning not the loss of his material possessions but of his cattle-minding identity. He was his ranch. Now, he’s flesh without purpose, despite the fact he has a daughter, Callie Rose (Lily LaTorre), whose mother Ruby (Meghann Fahy) is still very much in his life and has been since they were children.
Walker-Silverman draws directly from his own grief – the loss of his grandmother’s house to a wildfire – and from the community he witnessed rise up from the ashes. It’s a sparse tale, whose only sense of grandeur lies at the horizon of its pink-blue sunsets, all very Terrence Malick via Chloé Zhao.
But the wanderers of Rebuilding remain pointedly in situ. Dusty may talk of a cattle gig over in Montana, but what we’re actually watching is a solemn turn from temporary trailer home to temporary construction job, with the occasional visit to Ruby’s mother Bess (recent Oscar winner Amy Madigan, lovely in a small role) and to the parking spot outside the library where Callie Rose can log onto the free wifi.
Dusty, slowly, starts to bond with the other wildfire survivors, all neighbours on the same campsite. One of them, Mali (Kali Reis), is a mother and a widow of three months, whose husband stayed behind to try to save their home. But it’s a whisper-quiet propulsion that leads to the same brand of emotional revelation we always see from films about withdrawn men: right around the climax, Dusty starts to yell and yowl and send his belongings crashing to the floor. Then he goes back to the silence.
In the handful of scenes that follow, Dusty and his neighbours are finally forced to confront how existential the word “rebuilding” has become, now that climate change ensures no future is guaranteed (except for the ultra-rich). What do you invest in when everything could all crumble back down tomorrow? It’s moving to see a community dare to thrive in the face of the apocalyptic. Why, then, does the film act as if that beauty would shatter if a single member were allowed to show a single iota of anger towards those who pretend their suffering is either necessary or inevitable?
Zhao’s Nomadland, for all its comparable gentility, at least let Frances McDormand walk around with a pound of firecrackers behind her eyes – an energy O’Connor is demonstrably capable of, but consciously restrains here. Rebuilding, instead, is a lovely rendering of what feels like half a story. It’s not the action its title promises, but the preceding moment of retreat to lick one’s wounds.
Dir: Max Walker-Silverman. Starring: Josh O’Connor, Lily LaTorre, Meghann Fahy, Kali Reis, Amy Madigan. Cert PG, 96 minutes.
‘Rebuilding’ is in cinemas from 17 April
