In plain language Rebuilding doesn’t sound like much of a proposition. A guy whose farm has been burnt out by a devastating fire tries to put his life back together while taking shelter in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer. That’s it. But give it a bit of space, as director/writer Max Walker-Silverman gives his characters space, and it rewards the interest. It’s a warm and lovely film at many levels, but a psychologically nuanced one too.
The fire is a metaphor. When we first meet Rusty (Josh O’Connor) he’s selling off what’s left of his cattle and pitching up at the FEMA camp for people whose farms and homes have been destroyed. But with an ex wife, Ruby (Meghann Fahy,) who’s now happy with another guy, and a daughter, Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre), who will barely talk to her dad, Rusty’s psyche was clearly scorched earth even before the fire took everything.
Against a score of heartbreak and regret, as if Alison Krauss were about to break into song any second, O’Connor gives us another of those performances playing to his strengths. Rusty is a shrugging, shoe-gazing, word-swallowing kind of guy. Not stupid but hobbled by his own lack of ambition. We get the sense in their scant scenes between Ruby and Rusty that she left him on account of his huge inability to connect meaningfully with the world. Maybe he’s on the spectrum.
Whatever else Rusty is, he’s not a bad dad, and in the rebuilding of the Rusty/Callie-Lee relationship we first see the shoots of some sort of turnaround. Even though at the trailer park he now calls home, Rusty is adamant that he’s “not like these folks”, meaning other losers exactly like himself.
The trailer park is interesting. The film is set in Colorado, and maybe it’s my ignorance but I wouldn’t have expected the fellow farming folk taking shelter to include a pair of lesbians and a black couple. There is a “rainbow alliance” aspect to this movie which has the potential to goad a certain political demographic but also suggests Walker-Silverman, a former cowhand, is also projecting beyond his native state.
Realism isn’t the whole story here, though. They way people talk, for instance, tends to be in richly articulated, almost poetic sentences, their rhythms dovetailing with each other.
Talking about his previous film, A Love Song, Walker-Silverman told an interviewer that he “gave these characters the gift of silence with the knowledge that these roles would be played by two masters”. He meant Wes Studi and Dale Dickey, the stars of A Love Song. O’Connor is the actor who’s been given the gift of silence this time out. He fleshes out the incredibly spare dialogue with a big-hearted performance.
O’Connor carries the movie, but Lily LaTorre as young Callie-Rose is beautifully natural, and in the restricted screentime she gets, Fahy suggests a world of backstory between Ruby and Rusty.
The relaxed vibe makes for easy watching. It seems obvious the direction everything is heading but there are challenges on the way. They are, as they are meant to be, grist to the healing mill.
Does that all sound a bit like Nomadland done as a Hallmark movie? It is undeniably folksy. But this is a far less nakedly feelgood than a Hallmark movie, though the motivating impulse is about as uncynical as things come.
By the end the rebuilding work is well underway, in all the problematical areas delineated in the film’s opening moments. To be honest I didn’t want to watch Rebuilding that much – films demanding empathetic input are low on my list – but I was absorbed by it, felt as if I’d been gently picked up at the beginning and carried carefully right to the end. You may feel the same.
Rebuilding – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
