Good One Is a Strikingly Observant Coming-of-Age Short Story in Movie Form

India Donaldson’s Good One trades in voyeurism, but not necessarily the type you’d expect from a nervy Sundance debut. Low-key in approach but deeply observant, much of the movie involves Sam (Lily Collias), a 17-year-old girl, watching and listening in plain sight. Sam’s dad Chris (James Le Gros) and his longtime friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) know that she’s there; sometimes, they even address her directly, or solicit her opinion about this or that, as the three of them embark on a camping trip. But neither of them are quite accustomed to how clearly Sam sees them, and how attuned she is to their middle-aged weaknesses, whether she’s amused or deeply disappointed. Chris and Matt seem to take their status as the adults in the room (or, in this case, in the woods) for granted, even as they’re giving lip service to Sam’s maturity.

The audience better understands Sam’s watchfulness because Donaldson zeroes in on the face of her young lead, catching Collias in a range of expressions that far eclipse the stereotypical teenager repertoire of eyerolls and glowers. Those are there too, sometimes, but Sam also exhibits a kind of flickering skepticism over whether she can give these men the benefit of the doubt – or, in her father’s case, years of both love and frustration. Sam is weeks away from starting college, and you can almost see her performing the calculations of whether it will be easier to press her father or acquiesce to his self-centeredness and keep getting along to go along.

Having Matt there breaks tension at first, but ultimately may not be worth the levity he tries to bring. The lopsided camping trio is supposed to be a squared-off quartet, but Matt’s son, only glimpsed at the beginning of the film, bows out following some kind of hotheaded exchange with his sometimes blunt-spoken semi-failed-actor dad. Matt insists on proceeding as planned, and the remaining hikers head out of a damp summer-season New York City and into a forest upstate. There they will hike eight or nine miles per day, even if (as Chris sighs) Matt brings impractical jeans instead of shorts, overloads his backpack with pointlessly heavy freight (including, hilariously, a copy of the substantial tome Shogun, which self-evidently goes unread), and forgets his sleeping bag in the car. Chris’s ribbing of his friend is chased with a scolding sense of superiority; Chris is obviously the self-appointed expert in exercise and more disciplined self-care, boasting a somewhat trimmer dad-bod and, for that matter, a somewhat tidier midlife divorce, with a vastly more understanding child than Matt’s sullen son.

Or is Sam just better at keeping her resentments beneath the surface? Much of Good One plays like a cross between Kelly Reichardt and Noah Baumbach – with further crisscrossing between multiple modes of each filmmaker. There’s the modest, verdant-scenery male bonding of Reichardt’s Old Joy, plus the seething, stranded dynamic of Michelle Williams’ character in Meek’s Cutoff; similarly, the banter of a Baumbach comedy – the dialogue between Chris and Matt is often very funny – intersects with a lower-key version of Marriage Story tensions.

Donaldson is closer to Reichardt in terms of incident and quiet; not overmuch of the former and plenty of the latter. Yet the movie does turn on a betrayal – a couple of them, even – with the clarity and grace of a perfectly wrought short story. At the same time, Good One takes advantage of its medium, specifically the way that film can depict bits and pieces of conversation, conveying what’s overheard as well as what’s heard, at a distance that can be awkward to convey on the page. Details that would have to be described directly in a story, like the quickest glimpses of group-chat conversation on Sam’s phone, can flicker across the screen without as much fuss. The actors, too, can inhabit their characters with smaller gestures. Collias is a find, and Le Gros has become an expert at playing a certain type of muddling-through family man who convinces himself that certain selfish decisions are actually just him doing his best.

The flipside of Donaldson’s close and careful observation is that even smaller developments start to feel inevitable in a quasi-literary sort of way. Once the story makes its biggest turn, the movie becomes more predictable, just a tiny bit easier to chart out, right up to its open ending – one moment that probably would work better with just the right closing sentence, rather than the particular image the movie lands on. Still, this is a striking introduction to Donaldson’s unflinching eye.

Director: India Donaldson
Writer: India Donaldson
Starring: Lily Collias, James Le Gros, Danny McCarthy
Release Date: January 21, 2024 (Sundance)

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.