Good One review - a life lesson in the wild with her dad and his pal

Good One is a generation-and-gender gap drama that mostly unfolds during a weekend hiking and camping trip in the Catskills Forest Preserve in upstate New York.

A putative indie classic, writer-director India Donaldson’s psychologically acute feature debut focuses on a self-contained, observant young woman, Sam (Lily Collias), whose skepticism about hard-wired male attitudes grows exponentially over the weekend.

Sam lives with her gruff sixtyish dad Chris (James LeGros), his second wife, and a much younger stepbrother in a Brooklyn brownstone. On the eve of the hike with Chris and his buddy, Matt (Danny McCarthy), she hangs with her African-American girlfriend (Sumaya Bouhbal), explaining to her the purposes of various camping accoutrements.

The hike is an annual ritual, but this time Matt’s son, Dylan, has refused to come, angry because his mother has recently separated from Matt following a one-off fling he had while on business in Las Vegas. Matt is grieving for his wrecked marriage and for Dylan’s absence.

It quickly emerges on the hundred-plus miles drive north that Sam has more emotional intelligence than the stoical Chris and the self-pitying Matt put together. These old college bros – one settled, the other unmoored – recall the Oregon camping duo, whose lives have gone in different directions, in Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2006), a key influence here.

Donaldson is transparent in her belief that middle-aged, middle-class urban men of a certain type are imbeciles in the sensitivity department. Not that Good One judges Chris (a practised hiker) and Matt (an inept one) too harshly. Chris is a loving dad, though he struggles to communicate with Sam and labours under a superiority complex. Matt elicits sympathy when he sheds a tear because Dylan isn’t in the Catskills to share a beautiful vista with him. His bluff exterior – he oafishly teases Sam for being queer – conceals a soul, which he reveals in his appreciation of natural phenomena. (Pictured below: Danny McCarthy and James LeGros)Like Thomasin McKenzie’s character in Leave No Trace (2018), Sam has been trained by her father to be an expert woodsperson. She shows hapless Matt how to fix his tent and matter-of-factly siphons trickling water into a bottle for drinking. But hiking with two unreconstructed males inevitably places her in the position of being their cook and cleaner, mother and maid, the caretaker.

She is the adult in the wilderness – her low speaking voice that of a mature woman. Her unsentimental advice to Matt, to whom she serves as compassionate confessor, is delivered as tersely as Chris’s snipes at him. Donaldson, the daughter of the retired director Roger Donaldson and the knitwear designer Mel Clark, knows how children absorb their parents' behaviour and speech patterns.

As a lone female travelling with her protective father and his friend, Sam initially seems at risk more in a social than a sexual sense, even when three friendly hiker dudes show up and camp next door. (Their blithe remarks on their previous ambitious trips prompt insecure would-be alpha Chris to invite them on a Chinese hike that isn’t going to happen.)

Sam's vulnerability manifests itself in a pivotal late-night conversation she has with Matt two thirds into the film. Both men have quaffed from Matt’s hip flask and become a little drunk; Chris has retired to his tent. Consecutive firelit closeups of Sam – a profile of her looking at the moon, then at Matt, and a face shot of her looking to and from Matt for the second time – combine into a mesmerizing 42-second summation of her awareness of male pressure. Earlier shots have ahown her frequently registering and suppressing her disapproval of Chris and Matt's heedless behaviour. (Pictured below: James Le Gros; Danny McCarthy, with arms raised; Lily Collias)

What is Sam feeling as these seconds tick away? Her flickering uncertainty indicates her inner barometer has detected a change in the atmosphere. When a line is crossed, she has the wherewithal to remove herself gracefully from the scene. Echoing the breach of trust experienced by teen scrap-metal collector Ruth (Jessica Barden) in Nicole Riegel's Holler (2021), the incident – verbal in Sam's case – sends Good One into a hairpin bend.It’s apt, therefore, that Sam commandeers her dad’s car to help her restore her equilibrium. Quietly but emphatically, she redraws the line, her decisive action as much the film’s “good one” as Sam herself. Maybe the next time she’s behind the wheel, Chris will quit the mansplaining and Matt will keep his trap shut. The bigger point, of course, is that, in experiencing disillusion and learning how the world works, Sam has begun to arm herself for the future.

Good One is a film of surpassing subtlety, not least in terms of the three actors’ body language; the note-perfect Collias is a major discovery. Blessed by Wilson Cameron’s limpid cinematography, Donaldson uses the Catskills less for scenic pictorialism than as an isolated crucible for the film’s triangular drama. Complemented by talk of predatory bears, punctuation shots of worms and insects hint at nature’s power structure. So do fleeting shots of butterflies drawn to man-made piles of stones at a rocky creek – a superb ironic metaphor for traditional notions of femininity and masculinity.

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