‘Rebuilding’ Review – A Gentle Embrace Of Community In The Wake Of Disaster [Sundance 2025]

Art often imitates life, but I doubt anyone could have imagined the immediacy of Rebuilding’s relevance when Sundance’s programmers selected it for the festival.

A mere two weeks before the film screened in Park City, Utah, wildfires raged throughout Southern California, turning whole neighborhoods into rubble. We still don’t know the full scope of the damage, but recovery efforts are expected to take years, and some things may never return to their old normal.

That is the harrowing, sobering context to view Max Walker-Silverman’s film. Rebuilding is the aftermath of a ruinous wildfire that ripped through a rural community in Colorado. Dusty (Josh O’Connor) owned a ranch destroyed by the fire, leaving him homeless and without a job, having to sell his ranch animals for quick cash. He moves into a FEMA-sponsored trailer park with other townsfolk who lost their homes and are looking to start over. Complicating matters further is his strained relationship with his ex-partner Ruby (Meghann Fahy) and their daughter Callie Rose (Lily LaTorre), neither knowing what to expect from the unmoored, physically and emotionally distant Dusty. Despite his tenuous domestic and financial situations, Dusty finds a path through unthinkable and devastating disaster to discover and redefine what community means to him.

For a film sparked by a violent act of God, Rebuilding is remarkably quiet. Walker-Silverman begins his movie with free-floating embers of the wildfires’ end and shifts to the aftermath of burnt trees smothered in grayish hues. The horror is inescapable, but he isn’t afraid of the unsettling beauty. Instead of opening with engulfing flames and collapsing structures, he asks us to accept the natural world’s stunning imagery and our helplessness against it. That aching reality shapes the film’s atmosphere and Dusty’s perspective. There is no arguing or shouting; the few disagreements remain a palatable decibel. It’s the same on the opposite side of the emotional spectrum. Initially, Dusty is polite but distant with his new neighbors, struggling with labeling them that way. (“We’re not real neighbors,” he tells Callie Rose.) He sees himself as a loner and his situation as temporary, needing to get by just long enough.

The film’s gentle register and Dusty’s limited engagement work together to gently but effectively critique American individualism and the bureaucracy that punishes everyday citizens. Dusty owns his land, giving him a significant advantage. However, as a bank manager explains, the high-severity burns from the wildfires have left the land functionally dead and worthless. He also has livestock but has to sell them at a loss for a much-needed influx of cash. When Dusty takes Callie Rose to visit the farm’s remains, he insists he will rebuild but has little to no resources. (He has to park in the local library’s parking lot so she can do her homework on her iPad.) There is also a running clock on the trailer park, as FEMA plans to reclaim them, even though the residents are still struggling. Dusty’s insistence on isolation and government reliance leaves him little to work with.

What Dusty does have is the community he tries to keep at a distance. As his solo attempts at recovery fail, his neighbors and Ruby’s family support him with no expectation of reciprocation. He does reciprocate, though, and the mutual aid allows the community to find paths to healing. Walker-Silverman offers some truly gutting reflections on the different forms that loss can take. Dusty sharing that there are things he lost that he’ll never remember, except that he misses them, is particularly shattering. The safe space that Dusty unwittingly finds himself in also allows him to briefly embrace anger. Walker-Silverman raises the temperature accordingly but without causing tonal whiplash. When the film resettles into its stillness for its final beats, the resulting impact of its grace and faith in humanity is breathtaking.

Another critical source of that grace is Josh O’Connor, an actor who navigates quiet spaces with brilliant skill. Dusty may be quiet, but O’Connor fires from all cylinders with his performance. He moves with the sturdiness you’d expect from a rancher but with subtle undercurrents of resignation that convey the aimlessness that Dusty can’t verbalize. O’Connor’s smiles function similarly, attempting to bury Dusty’s sadness from his family and neighbors. However, he makes sure we know those smiles are a futile front, as effective as they were in Challengers and La Chimera last year. He has great scene partners in Meghann Fahy, who keeps Ruby’s frustration with Dusty’s lack of responsibility at a powerful simmer, and Lily LaTorre, who imbues Callie Rose with affecting skepticism and hesitancy in being vulnerable with him.

Even without the California wildfires in the back of our minds, Rebuilding is a lovely embrace of community and rejection of the “eff you, get mine” attitude that has infected American society. However, erasing that context is impossible, and we shouldn’t try to. The film is even more effective, to the point of being essential, when we overlay the real world onto how we comprehend it. One way is to demand more in times of crisis: of our government, which will leave the most vulnerable stranded, and of ourselves, so that we will start looking beyond our own backyards and remembering that we are stronger together than alone. I’ll admit that feels hokey, even as I type it, but I would prefer that to the alternative: watching free-floating embers that will destroy not only nature but all of us, too.

Rebuilding had its World Premiere in the Premieres section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Director: Max Walker-Silverman

Screenwriter: Max Walker-Silverman

Rated: NR

Runtime: 95m