There are aphorisms like “heartwarming” or “less is more,” so common when describing certain films, that they’ve become meaningless clichés. However, there’s no better way to talk about Rebuilding (United States, 2025), the second feature film from director Max Walker-Silverman (A Love Song), which is part of the official selection of the Rio Festival 2025.
It’s a modest drama, with a minimal story and just a handful of actors. A purification characteristic of the director’s work to direct attention to the sincere emotions in his characters’ journey.
What’s it about?
Dusty (Josh O’Connor) is a rancher from a family that has lived for generations on a Colorado ranch. One day, however, a wildfire destroys everything. With no roof or job, Dusty ends up in a trailer camp run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Without a clear direction or solution, he finds strength in his daughter and ex-wife, plus a community of displaced people who, like him, lost their homes but have created homes elsewhere.
Rebuilding is a balm for the soul
In other hands, with more economic resources and less sensitivity, the premise of Rebuilding could lend itself to narrating Dusty’s tragedy as a tear-jerking melodrama. And it’s not that his story isn’t tragic, but Walker-Silverman opts for the powerful elegance of subtlety.
From the audiovisual perspective, the director decides to show the beauty of moments of quiet and silence, highlighting both the rural landscapes of Colorado under the setting sun, and the joyful or intimate interactions between family members and new friends. Kindness is in the everyday.
We find that same restraint in the performances, and particularly in that of Josh O’Connor, who, similar to what he demonstrated in La Chimera (Italy, France and Switzerland, 2023), conveys his character’s dejection and emotional turmoil not with big outbursts, but with small gestures.
That’s why, although Rebuilding doesn’t follow a particularly original or grandiloquent narrative path, it achieves something even more difficult: a beauty that feels genuine and authentic because of its modesty.
It’s a delicate balance that could be broken by one too many musical flourishes, by a performance just slightly over the top, or by a moment that goes on too long. However, Walker-Silverman knows perfectly how far to take his actors, where to insert what music, and where to cut.
Therefore, Rebuilding manages to extract and transmit the beauty of its story about loss and uprooting: the past can be torn away suddenly and without remedy. However, the empathy of the heart—one’s own and that of others—hides the power to sow a new future.
