Good One

At 17, it’s already readily apparent that the adults in your life are more fragile than perhaps you once believed: not certain, not at all unafraid, perhaps not even wise. It’s a fact that college-bound Sam (Lily Collias) has become well-acquainted with over numerous camping trips with her father (James Le Gros) and his friend Matt (Danny McCarthy). For much of India Donaldson’s deceptively slight, tranquil debut, Sam will seem more the obvious parental figure than either of them. In the thick of the woods, she whips up noodles, listens with affectionate exasperation to tall tales and gently teases back. Still, Collias’s face has other stories to tell. As the two older men in her orbit – both divorced, and fully entrenched in either their second midlife crisis or first late-life one – vent their deepest insecurities, her patience betrays the smallest discomfort. “I feel like I still get to choose this life,” she declares matter-of-factly, while the two pontificate at length on choices they could have made and didn’t. Much as both men praise her wisdom, in this moment one senses the insecurity of a soon-to-be young adult with an unwritten future, facing down the barely concealed despair of two men who have travelled to the opposite side of adulthood and found it wanting.

Throughout, Good One is steeped in that highly specific unease that comes with any young person suddenly tasked with shouldering the load of their elders; people whose lives may no longer be mysteries, but who nonetheless still seem inescapably adult, separate from the way the young person perceives their own world (whenever she gets signal, Sam wistfully watches a party she could be at with peers passing her by). Throughout the trip, Matt, clearly something of a fond uncle figure to Sam and lightly bullied younger sibling to her father, is openly out of sorts. His son hates him, he discloses casually. That’s why he opted out of the trip last minute, preferring to stay in dad’s new apartment, which he openly says is depressing. As Matt gives frequent vent to the many sad dead ends at which his life has arrived, Sam listens compassionately. Still, there is also a quiet but unmistakeable wish that these grown men would be just that little bit less vulnerable with her; that they would give less of themselves away so thoughtlessly. Sam’s maturity is so wholly assumed by others that the two scarcely grant her room to form her own vocabulary of self.

McCarthy and Le Gros are both wholly persuasive as two different avatars of amiable disappointment. Matt is an actor, with the performative bluster and slight overconfidence in his own humour to match. He’s so deeply absorbed in his own foibles that he fails to see how others could be affected on the sidelines. In his quieter way, Sam’s father is the same, the kind of parent whose breeziness cannot conceal an innate inability to see or hear his child. However, what is ultimately so subtly resonant – and deeply sad – about Good One is the recognition embedded in Collias’s face: sometimes, growing up means realising just how completely grown-ups will let you down.

For all its scarcity of incident, the quiet core of Donaldson’s film rings ineffably true. Come the end of this camping trip, there is the unmistakable sense of something that will never return to the way it was, but also of a future that Sam is tentatively making her way towards. This is a movie that hangs heavy as a valued trinket in its aftermath: something to be delicately treasured.

Thomas Messner

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Watch the trailer for Good One here: