Sundance 2025 Review: REBUILDING, Loss, Grief, and Rediscovering Family

Despite the contrarian, anti-science protestations of some on the right, climate change is real. The effects thereof have been and will be felt in the years to come, including extreme weather events, such as the recent devastating wildfires that tore through Southern California, specifically Los Angeles County.

 

Wildfires, however, can occur practically anywhere, leaving families and communities at a complete loss, both financially and personally. Rebuilding can take not just days or weeks, but months or years.

 

That is the thematic and narrative focus of Max Walker-Silverman’s (A Love Song) second film, appropriately and simply titled Rebuilding. The film centers on Dusty (Josh O’Conner, Challengers, La Chimera, Aisha), an old-school, throwback cowboy who’s lost the family ranch to a Colorado wildfire, taking practically everything with it, including family mementos dating back several generations. Even as they fade, memories of Dusty’s pre-wildfire life painfully persist, like ghosts who refuse to take a hint and leave, adding to a persistently traumatized state for Dusty. 

 

Stuck in a state of denial, Dusty goes through the motions of recovery, including a visit to the local bank for a loan to rebuild what he’s lost. In an all too typical twist, Dusty finds himself unable to rebuild. The bank won’t accept the gutted ranch nor the surrounding, burnt-out property as collateral and without collateral, Dusty faces a destitute future, one where his identity, so closely tied to the family ranch, its surrounding acreage, and his memories, has become permanently unmoored.

 

When Dusty begrudgingly accepts help from the government, he’s relocated to a FEMA camp filled with mobile homes. At first, Dusty refuses the entreaties of the other inhabitants of the camp, preferring his own company, stubbornly adhering to a now outdated individualist ethos. The concept and practice of community seems foreign to Dusty, but soon enough, Dusty’s resolve begins to give way and the commonalities he shares with the other survivors become too urgent to ignore.

 

There’s another, deeper aspect of “rebuilding” to Dusty’s tale in Walker-Silverman’s poetic, lyrical film: the relationship he’s all but abandoned to his preteen daughter, Callie Rose (Lily LaTorre), not intentionally, but subconsciously. Completely sidestepping melodrama (i.e., conflict for conflict’s sake) that passes for realism, Walker-Silverman gives Callie Rose a loving relationship not just with her mother, Ruby (Meghann Fahy), and grandmother, Bess (Amy Madigan), but also Ruby’s live-in boyfriend.

 

Instead, Walker-Silverman makes a refreshingly different choice: Dusty and Ruby were once, long ago, a couple. They married, had Callie Rose, and somewhere along the way, realized their future didn’t lie with each other, but at least for Ruby, with someone else. Separation and divorce eventually followed. They’ve left whatever anger, frustration, and disappointment they felt behind, focusing only on their positive memories and Callie Rose’s future.

 

Dusty’s struggle to rebuild both his life and more importantly, regain the trust, respect, and conditional love of his daughter radically recenters Rebuilding into a story about a father rediscovering the primacy of his relationship with his daughter rather than say, rebuilding the family ranch or reacquiring the cattle he sold in the film’s earlier, low-key moments.

 

As such, Rebuilding leans hard on character and performance first and foremost over narrative or even dialogue. Given what he’s already shown audiences, O’Conner’s performance as Dusty, a master-class in laconic understatement, shouldn’t come as a surprise, though it does show another side of the British-born O’Conner’s talents and skills as a performer.

 

Of LaTorre as the preteen Callie Rose, Walker-Silverman asks much and, in turn, LaTorre gives much back, delivering an emotionally vulnerable, ultimately heartbreaking performance. As much as the scenes of devastation or Dusty’s attempts to rebuild his life will resonate with audiences, it’s the quieter, more introspective scenes between Dusty and Callie Rose that give Rebuilding its deepest, most long-lasting impact, one that will linger long after the credits roll.