Predictable and Flat, Rebuilding Has Good Intentions, but Dull Execution
Max Walker-Silverman has a penchant for rural Colorado. His 2022 debut, A Love Song was a sweet, closely-observed story about two former childhood sweethearts reuniting years later as widowers at a Colorado campground. Rebuilding, his latest, sees him returning to that spare, mountainous place with a story about a divorced rancher trying to put the pieces of his life back together after a natural disaster.
Walker-Silverman’s films are part of an emerging trend of post-Chloe Zhao-inspired films that take a humanistic look at the sometimes difficult lives of folks in the American west. It’s a trend that’s particularly Sundance-friendly; Zhao’s Songs My Brothers Taught Me, The Rider and Nomadland all played there to early success before racking up deserved acclaim later on. Unfortunately, the movies from other filmmakers following Zhao’s breakthrough (including Rebuilding) haven’t captured the same lightning she did. While her films find oodles of character and story and natural beauty that turn everyday experiences into the stuff of cinematic epics, the films that have followed have never achieved a comparable level of immersion.
Rebuilding follows the template Zhao set — a variation on the kind of rough-and-ready uplifting tale you’ll watch only once that’s long characterized festivals like Sundance and Tribeca — to diminished returns. Walker-Silverman’s movie isn’t even the first of its kind to come out this year, as Kate Beecroft’s East of Wall told a similar (and, unfortunately, similarly unremarkable) tale of reality-based hard-won hope about a Badlands-based family of horse trainers. These filmmakers’ hearts appear to be in the right place in all cases. Whether they have the ability to make these stories interesting to anyone else — the way Zhao always has — is another story.
After a wildfire destroys the ranch his family has run for generations, Dusty (Josh O’Connor) finds himself living in a FEMA trailer alongside several other displaced folks, and weighing his options over what to do next. He could go to Montana to work for his cousin, though it would mean leaving behind his ex-wife Ruby (Meghann Fahy), ex-mother-in-law Bess (Amy Madigan) and daughter Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre). He could try and take out a loan to rebuild the homestead, though Dusty has plenty of friends mired in debt who remind him how bad an idea that is.
While he stoically, non-verbally figures all this out, Dusty builds community (or rather, a community builds around him that he can’t ignore) with the other FEMA trailer-dwellers, including a widowed mom, Mila (Kali Reis), and a cast of other folks whose names we kind of learn but don’t spend enough time with to make much impact, apart from being kind of quirky. Dusty and Callie-Rose spend their days walking around the burnt skeleton of the ranch and using wi-fi at the library, where the building is mysteriously always closed, but the parking lot is full of bored families using the internet to escape for a few hours. Imagine what they could do if the place ever opened its doors!
There are moments of sweetness in Rebuilding that stand out. In one scene, Dusty, Callie-Rose and Mila’s daughter Lucy (Zeilyanna Martinez) deck out the interior of Dusty’s trailer with glow-in-the-dark stars to enchanting effect. In another, father and daughter sit together in simple satisfaction at the life they’ve built, recognizing its beauty. But these moments are surrounded by predictable story beats and a plot that wants to show rather than tell, but doesn’t do enough of either to help us understand the dynamics at play. The tension between Dusty, Ruby and Callie-Rose (what caused their split? What was their relationship like? What is it like at the point we meet them?) goes frustratingly unexplored, and Fahy in particular is underserved by a role that doesn’t give her much to work with.
Zhao’s movies succeed because they find unexpected beauty and startling wisdom in places that are usually characterized as flat, ugly and uneducated. She finds her subjects surprising. Rebuilding, like many other post-Zhao movies, wants the audience to be surprised by what they find, but you never get the sense the filmmakers themselves find their locations that special, or know their characters beyond the basic identities they present. They are, for the most part, exactly who they seem to be: tough but nice. The places they inhabit are so unremarkable, and unremarkably shot, that you’re left wondering why they’d want to hang around.
Rebuilding is a reminder that It’s a noble thing to want to make movies about everyday people. Their stories are worth telling. However, a key part to making that endeavor work is being curious about the people you’re depicting, and letting that curiosity — rather than an assumption that you already know everything there is to know — drive the storytelling.
Director: Max Walker-Silverman
Writer: Max Walker-Silverman
Stars: Josh O’Connor, Lily LaTorre, Meghann Fahy, Kali Reis, Amy Madigan
Release date: Nov. 14, 2025
Abby Olcese is an entertainment writer based in Kansas City. Her work has appeared at /Film, rogerebert.com, Crooked Marquee, Sojourners Magazine, and Think Christian. You can follow her adventures and pop culture obsessions at @abbyolcese.
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