Rebuilding (2025) Review: Quiet Resilience in the Aftermath of Loss

Rebuilding (2025) Review: Quiet Resilience in the Aftermath of Loss

A review by Marc Primo

In Rebuilding, writer-director Max Walker-Silverman crafts a soft-spoken, deeply compassionate look at a man whose life has drifted into a turning point he never expected. Known for the tender A Love Song, Walker-Silverman once again focuses on an ordinary person caught in emotionally tangled choices. The film was born from something personal: a fire that destroyed his grandmother’s home. What stayed with him wasn’t just the devastation, but the way neighbors, family, and strangers came together in its wake. That lived-in sense of place and community runs through every frame of Rebuilding. Even when the script leans a little too heavily into neat dramatic beats near the end, it’s hard to hold it against the film because by then the audience genuinely cares about these characters—and it’s clear the filmmaker does too.

Josh O’Connor, who’s having an undeniable banner year between The Mastermind, The History of Sound, Wake Up Dead Man, and now this film, steps into the role of Dusty—a man so unremarkably average that his quiet presence becomes the film’s emotional anchor. Living on a ranch along the western edge of the Rockies, Dusty enters the story already hollowed out by loss. A wildfire has wiped out everything he once called home, leaving him in a FEMA trailer among others who’ve endured the same heartbreak.

Walker-Silverman carefully traces the rhythms of the people orbiting Dusty, like Mali (Kali Reis), a mother raising her child alone after her husband stayed behind during the fire to defend what little they had left. Yet the filmmaker resists the temptation to lean into easy sentimentality. These characters, worn by grief and circumstance, aren’t positioned as clichés or tear-jerking devices. Instead, they create a textured backdrop—an unspoken reminder that Dusty’s struggle is just one thread in a larger tapestry of loss and survival.

At the center of the film lies a quietly affecting story: a man preparing to leave everything behind for a fresh start in Montana finds himself unexpectedly grounded by the renewed bond with his young daughter, Callie Rose (played with disarming warmth by Lily LaTorre). Dusty maintains an easy, respectful relationship with Callie’s mother, Ruby (Meghann Fahy), and even with his former in-law, Bess (Amy Madigan, in a role worlds away from her turn in Weapons).

Callie Rose begins spending time at her father’s trailer, arriving with small treasures to make the space feel like her own—tiny gestures that carry enormous emotional weight. Dusty, meanwhile, holds onto the painful knowledge that he plans to leave, and O’Connor plays this inner conflict with remarkable restraint. Scenes as simple as watching Callie place glow-in-the-dark stars on the wall hold a quiet ache, capturing the heartbreak of a father who knows he’s about to shatter the sense of home his daughter is trying so hard to build.

The film never fully explains why Dusty and Callie Rose drifted apart before the wildfire, but that ambiguity almost feels intentional. In many ways, the title Rebuilding speaks less to the reconstruction of a home and more to the fragile repair of a father-daughter relationship. Walker-Silverman threads this idea gently throughout the film—the notion that the real structure holding a life together isn’t a house or a job, but the people who show up when everything else collapses.

This theme surfaces in small but meaningful moments: Callie Rose tracing the branches of her family tree, Bess pulling out old photographs as if trying to remind everyone of who they once were. These scenes emphasize that memories and connections are the true foundations worth salvaging.

One particularly lovely moment comes when Amy Madigan’s Bess simply gazes at her granddaughter with unspoken affection—an expression so full of genuine love that it conveys far more than dialogue ever could. It’s in these quiet beats that the film’s emotional architecture feels the strongest.

Much of Rebuilding communicates its power in moments that barely need dialogue. It’s there in the way O’Connor buries emotion behind a tight swallow, or how Callie Rose instinctively turns her body away when bad news hits, or even in the single tear that escapes at just the wrong time. O’Connor is especially remarkable for embodying a man who simply lacks the language to articulate everything he’s feeling. His posture does the talking: he shrinks when cornered, yet straightens with quiet resolve when he knows he must face a truth.

One standout moment finds Dusty reflecting on the strange fragments of memory that keep surfacing—small, mundane things he lost in the fire—and the unease of realizing there are others he’s already forgotten. It feels like a confession he’s rehearsed alone in the dark, surrounded by the emptiness of his trailer. Walker-Silverman captures the unsettling blend of the intangible and the physical—the memories and the possessions—both reduced to the same fragile ash. And what weighs on Dusty most is the fear that everything he once held onto, emotionally and materially, is slipping away on the wind.

Rebuilding feels so emotionally authentic for most of its runtime that it’s easy to forgive the few late-story turns that lean a bit too heavily on drama—including a sudden death and Dusty’s final, somewhat tidy proposal. By the time these moments arrive, Walker-Silverman, LaTorre, and O’Connor have already built such a grounded emotional world that the film can withstand those more conventional choices. Their performances carry enough truth to smooth over the script’s sharper edges.

Ultimately, the audience isn’t looking for perfect realism—we’re rooting for something more profound. We want Dusty and Callie Rose not just to piece their lives back together, but to create something sturdier, richer, and more meaningful than what existed before the fire. In that hope, the film finds its most powerful resonance.