Rebuilding Film Review: From The Ashes

Josh O’Connor is captivating once again in Rebuilding, about a cowboy who finds community after losing his ranch in a wildfire.

That trend continues with Rebuilding, the new film from A Love Song director Max Walker-Silverman. The issue here is natural disasters, specifically how people are being impacted by wildfires that have become worryingly more common in the US. Walker-Silverman, who sets the story in his native Colorado, was inspired by his grandmother’s home burning down. Yet the devastating Southern California wildfires in January have given extra relevance to this rewarding story of resilience, community spirit and personal transformation.

The devastation of the wildfire in Rebuilding is on full display from the opening, where we see burnt-out trees and diggers clearing away rubble from a house. It belonged to Dusty (Josh O’Connor, La Chimera), who has now lost the ranch that had been in his family for four generations. Now he has to sell his cattle and move to a FEMA campsite, made up of a small enclave of trailers. Other people who lost everything to the blaze are living there, but Dusty is reluctant to interact. “We don’t need to bother nobody”, he tells his estranged daughter Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre, Run Rabbit Run). “Not real neighbours, anyway.”

Besides, this is only temporary. As he tells his ex-wife Ruby (Meghann Fahy, Drop), Dusty is contemplating moving to Montana for farm work during the calving season. That way, he can earn enough money to build the ranch back to what it was. However, a funny thing happens to Dusty. The other campers may have a shared sense of loss and struggle, but there is also a togetherness. They have meals outside together, and widowed mother Mila (Kali Reis, Catch the Fair One) is more than happy to bring food to a neighbour (or lend a booster seat to Dusty). And so Dusty starts to open up, finding community whilst reconnecting with Callie-Rose.

In a way, Rebuilding is very much a Neo-Western with its story of a lonesome cowboy facing the changing times. It helps that the film has the landscape shots of a Western, with Alfonso Herrera Salcedo capturing the natural beauty of the South Colorado sunsets and the desert backdrops with mountains on the horizon. “This is really a crisis in fast motion,” the radio says about a wildfire that has affected thousands and (thanks to climate change) has a high probability of affecting thousands more in the future. It adds to this realist picture that Walker-Silverman builds for his setting. The other ranchers who are struggling. The people who gather outside a locked library to use the Wi-Fi. The overstretching of the resources used to deal with these disasters.

It’s not a secret that Josh O’Connor is a brilliant actor. Rebuilding is not even his only great film of 2025 (see The Mastermind and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery). Nonetheless, he is really captivating as the individualistic and inward Dusty. Part of what makes O’Connor so great is the subtleties he adds to each role. Here, it is a closed-off stoicism that masks Dusty’s uncertainty about his future. He is a man without a home and, though he has a plan, the scorched earth will make it unfeasible. And so, as O’Connor sells perfectly, Dusty will come to realise how necessary the people right in front of him (and the help he has resisted for so long) are. In this time of need, he finds help and kindness.

Importantly, there is a wonderful supporting cast that accompanies O’Connor’s sensitive performance, from Fahy and Reis to Amy Madigan (Weapons) as mother-in-law Bess and the non-professionals playing Dusty’s neighbours. Also worth mentioning is LaTorre’s natural, beyond-her-years performance as Callie-Rose, who we sense has to swallow some of her sadness around an already-distant father who might have to leave for another state.

This is a drama of new beginnings and starting over that is conveyed in a simple but humane story, guided by O’Connor’s performance and the soft rhythms of the plot (enforced by the guitar score from Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington). This mellowness and warmth will not be for everyone, but there is still much to appreciate here. And the film earns the sentimental coming together that makes up its touching conclusion.

Rebuilding turns out to be a perfect title for this film, because it is ultimately about how to rebuild your life and change for the better. As we see at one point, a sapling can start to grow from even the most charred of trees, proving Walker-Silverman’s timely message of revival coming from the darkest point. From displacement comes hope. From the ashes comes rebirth.

Rebuilding will be released in theaters in New York on November 14, 2025 and in Los Angeles and more theaters nationwide on November 21.