Working in his native Colorado, as he did in his memorable debut feature, A Love Song, Max Walker-Silverman again conjures a potent visual language from the landscape in Rebuilding. And, again, the writer-director places a halting love story at the center of his film. This time, though, the rural vista is scarred by a devastating wildfire, and it isn’t sweethearts separated by time who become reacquainted but a father and his young daughter, separated by divorce.

That father is an unmoored cowboy named Dusty, trying to figure out what comes next after the flames have destroyed his ranch, the place that defines him. The wrenching heart of this quiet drama, he’s played with eloquent understatement by Josh O’Connor, delivering the latest in a remarkable string of performances, and one that’s matched beat for poignant beat by the other members of the central cast.

Notwithstanding the eerie timeliness of the movie, arriving as Los Angeles is reeling from disastrous conflagrations, this is a work whose riches transcend topicality. With his understanding of and affection for the hardy inhabitants of the mountainous American West, Walker-Silverman brings a new and tender radiance to the idea of regional filmmaking, along with an awareness of outworn stereotypes. Upending clichés about rugged individualism, Rebuilding looks toward a communal vision of courageousness and reinvention, a way to move forward without negating the past — especially when the remnants of that past have been reduced to ash.

Reteaming with cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo, Walker-Silverman wields an elegant shorthand, beginning with the ominous beauty of embers against a night sky. Cutting from that opening image to a ghostly scorched forest of leafless trees, Rebuilding delves straight into Dusty’s limbo, beginning with the auction of the cattle his charred land can no longer sustain. The editing, by Jane Rizzo and Ramzi Bashour, is finely attuned to the straightforward, crystalline lensing and the story’s often wordless poignancy. And the acoustic score by Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington is in sync with the interplay of dialogue and loaded silences, and well abetted by the occasional strains of country on the radio of Dusty’s truck. (A John Prine tune caps things off in the perfect key.)

Having kicked around here and there for a couple of months after the fire, Dusty is the last arrival at a mini-village of FEMA trailers arranged on a remote scrap of land. Alone in the narrow interior of his new home with the few boxes that hold his remaining earthly possessions, he jumps in his truck to escape the aching silence, arriving at a cheery clapboard house in town. Its kid-friendly yard clutter and warm interior (outstanding work by production designer Juliana Barreto Barreto) are an antidote to the sudden, awful emptiness of Dusty’s days. This is the home of his former mother-in-law, Bess (Any Madigan), and it’s where his ex, Ruby (Meghann Fahy), is raising their 9-year-old daughter, Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre).

Ruby is surprised to see him, but doesn’t waste the opportunity to enlist him in some parenting. Without spelling it out in conversation, this narrative sequence makes clear, in Ruby’s almost angry decisiveness, Callie-Rose’s shyness bordering on detachment, and Dusty’s awkward hesitation, that he hasn’t been a steady part of his little girl’s life for a while. LaTorre, who starred opposite Sarah Snook in Run Rabbit Run, is captivating, conveying her character’s perceptiveness as well as the observational knack she’s inherited from her mother. “Mom says you didn’t apply yourself,” she informs her dad, who takes the judgment good-naturedly even as he feels the sting. Sometimes, clearly, his daughter’s intelligence intimidates him.

For Callie-Rose, whose guardedness soon gives way to infatuation, there’s an unmistakable gift in her father’s calamity: He’s released from the chores that claimed all his waking hours. The cowboy stuff that once put him at a distance is now a source of fascination and a way of connecting. In an especially lovely scene, he teaches her to saddle his horse, being housed for now by a fellow rancher (Dwight Mondragon). Dusty’s trailer-park life is no less an adventure for his daughter. She makes a new friend (Zeilyanna Martinez), a tween girl whose father died in the wildfire, and together they plant a firmament of glow-in-the-dark stars on the drab walls of Dusty’s trailer, interrupting his despair with magic.

Callie-Rose helps to draw her father into this new community, a place he initially regards as a mere way station, a blip on the road back to the life he’s always known. But that road is not as direct as he envisions it. A man of few words, Dusty is most animated when talking about rebuilding the ranch that has been in his family for four generations. You can see his dream of that yearned-for return shatter, and his soul sink, as he takes in the crushing advice of a loan officer (Jefferson Mays) at the local bank.

The people Dusty at first views as “not real neighbors anyway” quickly become a family of sorts, sharing meals and memories of the things they lost in the fire. With the exception of Mali, a heroically even-keeled widow played by Kali Reis, of True Detective, the roles of Dusty’s fellow survivors are handled by first-time screen actors, including the accomplished musician Binky Griptite. Most of them have a few moments of character-sketch screen time, but, more to Walker-Silverman’s point, they stand collectively in calm, sturdy rebuke to the notion, long endorsed by Hollywood, of a homogenous rural America. (Another Sundance selection this year, the South Dakota-set East of Wall, offers its own cliché-busting picture of the West.)

Dusty’s new neighbors include a lesbian couple (Nancy Morlan and Kathy Rose), a biracial couple (Biptite and Jeanine London), an affable plumber (David Bright) and a man of the woods (Christopher Young) who maintains a friendly distance. Mainly they’re emblems, here not to complicate the story but to provide a composite portrait of kindness and resilience. (The most glaringly underdeveloped role in the drama belongs to Ruby’s partner, Robbie, an amenable guitar-strumming fellow played by Sam Engbring.)

In the presence of his fellow FEMA tenants, Dusty is at first like a forlorn big kid, slouching slightly as if to minimize his towering frame, thrusting his normally hardworking, newly idle hands into his jeans pockets, and, yes, occasionally helping himself to one of his daughter’s juice boxes. But beneath the lost, juvenile aura are questions of legacy and a keen awareness of the life he’s inherited — not an easy one, as the dates on his parents’ headstones in the family plot attest.

The matter of rootedness is addressed head-on when Callie-Rose goes to work on a family tree, presumably for school. As the girl, her parents and grandmother sit around a table filled with names and photographs, what might have been merely literal in lesser hands unfurls with a powerful current of love beneath its minimal dialogue.

Fahy, infusing her atypical role with an earthy grace, delivers a couple of the movie’s most affecting passages, the language’s simplicity matched by the emotions’ enormity. And Madigan’s modest directness lays a foundation for the drama in a way that’s so masterful in its subtlety, you’d be tempted to call it sleight of hand.

On the face of it, Dusty is a role that might seem a stretch even for shapeshifter O’Connor, who in a few short years has traveled a path of electrifying versatility, beginning with God’s Own Country and his star-making turn on The Crown, and on through such diverse terrain as Mothering Sunday, La Chimera and Challengers. But the British actor is compelling from first moment to last, fully inhabiting the character’s pain and confusion as well as his essential optimism.

Everyone in Rebuilding is sincere, honest and caring, and nothing is overplayed — including the bashful love that blossoms between Dusty and Callie-Rose and is the engine of the story. As this exceptionally quiet movie unfolds, there are moments when you might wish for more friction, more heat, like the healthy dashes of hot sauce with which Madigan’s character doses the scrambled eggs she serves her granddaughter. But Walker-Silverman is a filmmaker who doesn’t hew to formulaic arcs, and it would be a mistake to interpret quietness as tranquility or ease. Something more complex and rewarding than surface tension is at play here, and it builds to a conclusion of breathtaking openheartedness. Sometimes a blip on the road is magic in disguise, the root of a dazzling new constellation.

PARK CITY, Utah —  For those of us fortunate enough to avoid evacuation, much less life-altering destruction, during the recent L.A. wildfires, the past weeks have come with a certain numbness. What level of grief is appropriate, after all, if you are experiencing it secondhand?

“Rebuilding,” from writer-director Max Walker-Silverman, provided the outlet I needed. Starring Josh O’Connor as Dusty, a rancher trying to pick up the pieces after a wildfire destroys his home, the film culminates in a moment of sorrow — and resilience — that finally brought me to tears: “You got what you got,” as one character puts it, “and it was always enough for me.”

The film, which deals with derelict FEMA trailers, bureaucratic red tape and the impossible choice between starting over or moving on, was inspired by Walker-Silverman’s own family tragedy: A wildfire destroyed his grandmother’s Colorado home, taking her beloved recipes with it and leaving her once-verdant land a blackened burn scar. Co-starring Lily LaTorre as Dusty’s daughter, Callie-Rose; Meghann Fahy as his ex, Ruby, and Kali Reis as Mila, a woman who’s lost not only her home but her husband in the fire, “Rebuilding,” with uncanny timing, relates a tale that will be told many times over the coming years in Southern California and other disaster zones.

Ahead of the film’s premiere, Walker-Silverman and the film’s cast visited The Times’ studio at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

Max, I want to start with you, since your family’s experience of a wildfire inspired the film. How is your family doing now? What part of the rebuilding process are you all in?

Max Walker-Silveman: This story comes about from a very basic human thing, which is loving one’s home and feeling good there, and then being forced to reconcile with that home being fragile and occasionally being taken from us. And strangely, even in the face of that loss, a feeling of home remaining and, in a very surprising way, being deepened. It’s an experience that I’m familiar with and that many people are familiar with. And it’s very surprising. This movie I created [is] about not disaster, ultimately, not loss, but about the amazing things that happened afterwards, which is, time and time again, people taking care of each other and communities coming together and people being friends and neighbors in ways they never would have otherwise. And I wrote this, I think, because disaster is going to be part of our lives forever. It’s not something that will really begin or end. And if that’s the case, hopefully the communities that come together afterwards can continue to be part of our lives as well.

For the rest of you, I’m wondering if in making this film anything about the rebuilding process struck you or surprised you or maybe dismayed you about how that plays out in our country right now for people?

Josh O’Connor: As Max articulates powerfully, these disasters are becoming more frequent and affect everyone, directly or indirectly, more frequently now. So I was really interested in Max’s focus on the human side of how we respond. And community is the solution in these matters. And I think right now, as you alluded to, we’re all very aware of what’s going on in L.A. and all over the world. And our job is to look at the human impact of these things.

Dusty starts off being very concerned with the idea of “building back just the way it was.” And what we watch him do is sort of understand how change and adaptability might actually allow for more of that hope than exactly putting things the way that they were. What were the conversations like between you and Max that sort of helped you understand the mindset that Dusty has and how it changes over the course of the film?

O’Connor: One of the early chats we had, and something we went and explored a bit and it’s actually in the movie, is the surprising and magical moment when green comes back to the landscape. Dusty’s image of rebuilding as it was, you know, replicating what they had, it’s in a way tied in to grief. And there’s something really exceptional about accepting something different that doesn’t necessarily have to be worse or better, but is new. That’s what I really liked about this moment of the green coming through — that landscape, irrespective of him trying to get the loan or trying to build back what he had, it will never be the same. And that can be a beautiful thing.

It’s interesting that you bring up grief because what I experienced watching the film, Meghann, is when your character reads [a] letter [from her late mother], it was like the emotions that I had about the fire came out. I’m wondering if you could talk about what the atmosphere was like on set that day.

Meghann Fahy: The vibe on set, as it was every day, was sort of gentle and loving and very peaceful. And it’s a very intimate moment. We’re all just sort of seated at this table. And I think I sort of felt the support energetically just by being at that round table with those people.

Walker-Silverman: That scene that you did there, Meghann, is like really one of the most amazing performances I’ve ever seen. I remember exactly where I was. I was curled up on that little staircase in the house with my monitor and I couldn’t see properly. And realized I was just crying. And then the take ended and everyone on set was crying.

Fahy: But that’s the thing about grief, is that it can feel so lonely when you’re in it. But that’s such a perfect example of every single person on that set, I’m sure everyone’s life has been touched by grief. So it’s just such a beautiful representation, that moment in the film, of another deeply human experience. And it is a connective tissue, whether or not we’re always aware of it or not.

Josh O’Connor and Lily LaTorre in “Rebuilding.”

(Jesse Hope / Sundance Institute)

Kali, your character asks about staying in Colorado, “How long until it burns again?” I’m wondering how you kind of understood her fear of the fires coming back and causing destruction again, and then how she arrives at a kind of place of saying, “You know what, I do want to rebuild here instead of elsewhere.”

Reis: She says as much as she hates it here, she loves it here. And I think that’s her final connection to the loss, not only of her home, but her husband. And I think her real connection, she’ll always be there, because that’s where she lost them. So I know as much as she wanted to run away from the place that may burn again, that’s the connecting piece that she has — and this community that she built around this tragedy, this real human experience. You know, these natural disasters, they don’t have any prejudice. Everybody kind of came together in this community. So I think her final decision was, “If I have to go through it again, what better place to go through it again? What better people?”

One last question for the whole group. At one point, Dusty says, “It’s funny, the things you pack and the things you leave.” I wonder if the experience of making this film made any of you think of a particular heirloom or important item in your life, in your home, that you now would be like, “That’s on my list to make sure that I save.”

LaTorre: I only found out about it a few days ago, but my great-grandmother, she wrote a book — I think it was either about her life or about the university she went to. And it’s a really old book and we’ve got it at our house and watching the movie, it kind of made me think, “Well, this is my great grandmother’s. I wouldn’t want to just leave it there.” I would try my absolute hardest probably to save that antique to have the memory of my great grandmother.

Fahy: That’s a great one.

Walker-Silverman: My mom lost her mom’s recipes in the fire, handwritten recipes. So I think I have some recipes from my mom that I would treasure very much.

O’Connor: My grandmother’s ceramics would be like, I’d have an exit strategy.

Reis: I would definitely take my late brother’s necklace that he has. There’s five of us, and I would take his necklace with me for sure.

Fahy: I have a piece of jewelry from my grandmother that I think would be something I would want to keep.

1 of 5 | Stephan James stars in “Ricky,” which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute

The film parses out information about what led to Ricky’s arrest. Characters reference past events vaguely because they are all familiar with it, as opposed to pointed exposition for the audience.

This not only keeps the audience curious to find out more about the Smith family, but makes the drama more natural. Scenes don’t feel constructed just for a movie.

For Ricky, the demands on parolees, though justified, are so high they create a precarious situation that could collapse at any time. He needs to keep appointments with his parole officer (Sheryl Lee Ralph), find a regular job, attend parolee support meetings, and avoid any felons or drugs, which present themselves around every corner.

Ricky can’t do this alone. He doesn’t have a driver’s license yet and relies on his brother, James (Maliq Johnson) for rides.

It only takes one time for his brother to forget, or love interest Cheryl (Andrene Ward-Hammond) to escalate into a volatile scenario, and Ricky has inadvertently violated his parole.

In many ways, Ricky is still emotionally 15. He’s trying to cope with having missed out on many formative socializing years.

He might take a joke from James personally. He might trigger Cheryl and provoke an even more volatile fight.

The film continues to share more about the Smith family, the neighborhood and even the parole officer late into the film. In the script co-written by director Rashad Frett and Lin Que Ayoung, these are characters with history that only becomes clear when relevant to the current situation.

Ricky’s progress may feel like he takes one step forward and two steps back. However, there is gradual headway.

It takes patience and compassion, powerful emotions with which any piece of art can deal. Ricky embodies that without shying away from the harsh realities of the situation.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.