Rebuilding – Glasgow Film Festival 2026 Review
“How are you holding up?”, Dusty’s (Josh O’Connor) friends keep asking. His family ranch has recently burned to the ground in a vast Colorado wildfire, and he’s now living in a makeshift motor home community with a group of others who have also lost everything. It’s a bare-bones place, with few amenities – he has to take his young daughter, Callie Rose (Lily LaTorre), to go and sit in the Library parking lot when she needs the Wi-Fi to do her homework.
Dusty, who was working as a cowboy before the fire, is a quiet man. He doesn’t like staying in one place for too long, and he doesn’t talk about his emotions easily. His ex, Ruby (Meghann Fahy), who still loves him platonically, worries about how he’s processing the loss. Although he keeps talking about leaving to find work in Montana, she hopes he’ll stick around, stay with his daughter, and try rebuilding. With the help of his community, both old and new, that’s just what he does.
Rebuilding, written and directed by Max Walker-Silverman, is a lovely watch. It’s one of those precious movies without a single human villain – even the government bureaucrat who throws a spanner in the works for the motor home gang is allowed a moment of grace. This is a film that acknowledges that to be a person in the world is to be subject to a terrifying precarity, and the only way to make it through more or less in one piece is in the company of others. In lesser hands, a message like that could have been delivered with an excess of syrup, or didactically, but Max Walker-Silverman fills his film with still moments which allow the life-affirming moral to settle softly. That this little movie all takes place against the background of soaring vistas and wide blue skies make it feel all the more grounded in the real, raw earth.
Walker-Silvermann is aided by a terrific cast, headed up by man-of-the-moment Josh O’Connor. Ably sporting both a cowboy hat and an American accent, O’Connor remains the gentlest of leading men, with his warm, apologetic smile and his ability make a big impact without doing much at all. Because Dusty is a quiet soul, O’Connor transmits his feelings via his face rather than in any emotional speeches, and that’s all he needs to express his character’s deep emotional journey.
He has an excellent scene partner in Lily LaTorre, who is similarly expressive despite her young age. She puts so much into the way Callie Rose looks at her father: love, confusion, hope, resentment, wonder. As they sit side by side in the truck bed in that parking lot, the strength of their bond is so tangible. And it’s strengthened further by the rest of the family unit, particularly Amy Madigan as the subtly scene-stealing matriarch, who could not be further from the terrifying character she’s currently Oscar-nominated for in last year’s Weapons.
Although Rebuilding is a small movie, in a world that has rarely seemed so precarious, it feels a vital one too. Watch it, and soothe your soul for ninety minutes.
★★★★★
