Good One

In India Donaldson’s outstanding debut feature, a camping trip goes terribly wrong. Nope, Good One isn’t a horror film, but still, there’s plenty dread to be had in this sharp-eyed exploration of the shifting power dynamic between a teenage daughter, her divorced dad, and his sad-sack best friend as they backpack through the Catskills.

Their annual hiking trip gets off on the wrong foot right away when Sam (Collias) and her dad Chris (Le Gros) discover their usual gang of four has been whittled down to three, after washed-up actor Matt (McCarthy) announces his teenage son, still angry about his parents’ fresh breakup, is boycotting the trip this year. Sam doesn’t say it out loud, but her face telegraphs her displeasure. She didn’t sign up for this particular lineup, and the “Dad-Kid Hiking Trip” vibes have been seriously downgraded to “Two Middle-Aged Divorced Dudes and One of Them’s Queer Daughter Who Really Doesn’t Want to Share a Room With Them and Now Has to Sleep on the Floor.”

Good One has that kind of dry humor – deeply familiar for anyone who’s ever been a woman negotiating not-exactly-enlightened men, or suffered endless indignities just because you had the bad luck of being the youngest person in the room. A wordless exchange between Sam and a convenience store clerk – two young women asking and answering in one shared look the eternal question: “can you believe these two idiot men?” – is priceless. It’s also one of the last points of connection and camaraderie Sam will encounter on the trip. In the rare instance Chris or Matt think to ask her a question, they hardly wait to hear her reply.

As they go deeper into the woods, the dynamic continues to shift in intriguing, then infuriating ways. In a gripping scene set around a campfire, Donaldson’s camera placement is revealing. As the two grown men trade monologues, it is Sam’s reactions the camera fixes on. Sam is attentive, sympathetic, even when spoken of in the third person (“I tried not to fuck her up,” her dad says, even as she sits right next to him). By the end of the scene, I suspect most of the audience will have worked up a righteous fury on behalf of Sam. A relative newcomer, Collias is doing extraordinary things with her face alone, here and in the film’s climactic, point-of-no-return exchange between father and daughter. Out of a tight, terrific cast, it’s Collias’ performance – so alert and contained, its potency comes on later, like a time-release pill – that gets under your skin. It’s a star-making turn: not just a good one, a great one.