It’s safe to say Josh O’Connor has hit his acting stride. In 2025 alone, the performer has starred in four films, including the commercially major (Rian Johnson’s latest whodunnit, Wake Up Dead Man), the critically major (Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind), and the relatively more minor (Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound). The quality of this range of films is certainly up for debate, but equally certain in each outing is that O’Connor is decidedly not phoning anything in. Whether it’s the existentially- and faith-challenged priest in Wake Up Dead Man or the bumbling father and half-assed heister in The Mastermind, O’Connor is fully committed to whatever layers and perambulations the film requires. The first of two November releases for the actor, Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding, is no different. Here, O’Connor plays Dusty, a classic #American rancher who has lost everything in a wildfire. He now lives in a FEMA trailer on a small patch of land alongside other displaced families, which subsequently finds him doing a lot of brooding and kicking up dirt with the toe of his well-worn boots.
Unfortunately, even O’Connor’s committed, resonant performance can’t save Rebuilding from settling into the regrettable terrain of stereotypical poverty porn awards bait. It’s tough to be too critical of Walker-Silverman’s script, loosely based as it is on personal experience, but the treacly melodrama wrung from this intimate history and ultimately put onscreen practically begs for a flaying. Even the title is so on-the-nose as to be groan-inspiring — not only is Dusty rebuilding his life after the fire, but also his relationship with his daughter, Callie Rose (Lily LaTorre), with whom he had a complicated dynamic even before the tragedy. The film’s central conflict hinges on Dusty taking a job a few states away; because his identity is so centered on being a rancher, he can’t imagine a different life. But Callie Rose doesn’t know he’s planning on leaving, and he doesn’t seem to know how to tell her. The other residents of the makeshift refugee community, characters who in similar works function to add grit and texture to the periphery, are equally overwritten. In the weak vein of a film like Nomadland, these characters primarily exist as manipulative reinforcement of a main character’s miserable circumstance, and their moments of drama — such as when Mila (Kali Reis), a woman Dusty meets at the camp, reveals that her husband died when he ran back into the fire — ring hollow.
It’s all unfortunate, because a more successful script could have taken all these elements and made a compelling emotional drama, or perhaps an experiential aesthetic document — or both. The dynamic between Dusty and Callie Rose feels akin to the father-daughter relationship in Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, but it’s here rendered with a far more artificial gloss, resulting in too many eye-roll-worthy scenes, despite the two actors’ admittedly excellent work with the weak material. One standout character, Callie Rose’s grandmother Bess (Amy Madigan), is more successfully written and doesn’t feel constructed with the sole purpose of bringing tears to viewers’ eyes, but her part is so minor that it fails to make a dent in the larger armor of flaws the film wears. Rebuilding is more successful in developing a visual dynamism, with its images of a decimated Colorado countryside managing both a beauty and a brutality that are each affecting in their own way, genuinely stoking feelings of grief for the displaced residents. But this measure of success is too often undermined due to the film’s overwrought atmosphere of melancholy and thirst to generate feeling at every turn. A rebuilt script might have smoothed the whole into a better balance, but in its final form here, everything seems to sink into an unfortunate quicksand of sentimentality.
DIRECTOR: Max Walker-Silverman; CAST: Josh O’Connor, Meghann Fahy, Kali Reis, Amy Madigan; DISTRIBUTOR: Bleecker Street; IN THEATERS: November 14; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
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