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.
