Rebuilding: Josh O’Connor delivers a tender performance in this timely story of a rancher set adrift by wildfires

“Can you even be a cowboy, without cows?” demands Dusty’s dogged nine-year-old daughter Callie-Rose, unwittingly summarising her father’s existential dilemma. Because the hero of this small, determinedly stoic movie about a wildfire survivor has lost not only his family’s small, century-old Colorado ranch, but his raison d’être. After his cattle are swiftly auctioned in a scene as painful as it is short, Josh O’Connor’s shy, bashful Dusty can’t fix on anything except rebuilding the one-man homestead that has been his entire world. 

Far from the sweeping life-or-death wildfire drama of The Lost Bus (2025), this delicate film is a quiet but revealing ‘aftermath’ story, gently examining the human impact of the American south-west’s now-frequent fires. Filling it with parched but beautiful San Luis Valley landscapes, charred hillsides and long silences, Colorado-based director Max Walker-Silverman creates an unabashedly regional movie with a muted but vital message. Dusty’s hardships highlight the real-life difficulties of Coloradans living in the water-depleted, fire-ravaged high desert, where climate change is wiping out small farms. 

The film’s delicate, low-key plot trots after Dusty like the single mare he retains, stabled with a neighbour. Stuck in a tiny Fema trailer park and forced into a road-mending crew, he is crushed by a local banker’s verdict that his ranch’s scorched earth won’t support cattle for a decade. But Walker-Silverman’s spare script also plants subtle green shoots of connection. As Dusty shyly socialises with his ex-wife (a straight-talking Meghann Fahy) and pot-growing mother-in-law (a warm, slightly hokey Amy Madigan) and rediscovers Callie-Rose, we guess that the title is about more than housing. Befriended by his trailer neighbours (a sprinkling of fine non-pro actors, and the trenchant Kali Reis as a widowed single mother), he’s part of a community for the first time.

But what stands out in this Kelly Reichardt-style character study is the gentle, undemonstrative love woven between Dusty and the clever Callie-Rose (a wonderfully natural Lily LaTorre) as they ramble on his horse or chart his family’s long history on the ranch. O’Connor, playing another in his long line of meek, diffident loners, gives a nicely tender performance, full of sheepish hesitations and longing glances at his beloved blue mountains and scrubland.

It’s a sincere movie celebrating quiet resilience, Dusty’s story working hard to seek a small salvation and to redefine the idea of homecoming. Quietly but intently, it hymns the value of hope in a hard world.

► Rebuilding is in UK cinemas from 17 April.