‘Good One’ Movie Review: From NZ Writer-Director India Donaldson

This debut feature film from New Zealand-born director India Donaldson is an insightful look at quiet betrayals and learning to trust your gut, writes Alissa Wilkinson.

Good One is a drama about human relationships, but it starts with close-up shots of plants and insects, setting the scene in more ways than one. Yes, the characters will spend most of the movie in the woods, and high summer in upstate New York is quite literally full of dirt, bugs and leafy canopies. But contemplating the rich greens and earthy red-browns, I found myself pondering life cycles, the mutating forms and constant shifts of the natural world – and of human life, too. I don’t think that’s an accident.

The “good one” of the title is Sam (Lily Collias), who is 17 and on a camping trip with her high-strung father, Chris (James Le Gros), and one of his oldest friends, an underemployed actor named Matt (Danny McCarthy). Matt’s son was supposed to come too but bailed in a fit of pique, still bitter about his parents’ divorce. So it’s just Sam and the men.

Sam is exactly the type to get called the “good one” – not because she’s a prim Goody Two-shoes but because she’s the sort of teenage girl that adults, especially men, feel comfortable around. She’s level-headed and knows how to snark when necessary. In the woods, she pulls more than her own weight – she can pitch a tent, load up a day pack, filter water, build a fire and cook steaming bowls of ramen. She’ll take advice, but she’s equally good at giving it, an independent thinker with whom any grown-up could talk.

And boy, do Chris and Matt talk. Their relationship is rife with old rivalries and structured by all the selves they once were, all the way back to nearly Sam’s age. You can see them fall into an old script, Matt the hapless mess who packs all the wrong stuff and Chris the organised leader who gets mad when the energy bars aren’t in the right place.

Sam observes her father’s digs at Matt as they trek across the forest for three days, often silently, only her eyes betraying her thoughts. She has seen this dynamic her whole life. It unnerves her a little, the realisation that these guys in their 50s, a couple of life stages ahead of her, are as immature as the boys she knows from home.

In fact, there’s a little arrested development in both of these men. If Sam is suspended between adolescence and adulthood, the way everyone is the summer before college, these guys have never really ditched their adolescent rivalry. Maybe they just regress when they’re together, but their immaturity registers as self-centredness, a fixation on their own comfort and self-perception. The night before the hike, the three check into a hotel room with two double beds. Sam realises without really having to ask that they both expect to sleep in a bed while she’ll crash on the floor. It’s fine, and she’s young, but it’s not exactly gentlemanly. And while you’d never call them misogynists, their tiny offhand comments about women raise Sam’s eyebrows.

But when something does happen, it’s totally unexpected and revelatory, a moment that feels incredibly familiar, I’d wager, to most women. I don’t want to give away Sam’s moment of truth, because it arrives without warning even though it was there all along. Nothing really happens in Good One, but everything happens inside Sam.

For that to work requires an extraordinary lead performance, and Collias is truly extraordinary. We’ll be seeing a lot more of her in the future. I thought of Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone or Thomasin McKenzie in Leave No Trace, both star-making turns in small character-driven indies directed by Debra Granik, or Julia Garner in Kitty Green’s magnificent drama The Assistant. Some magic arises when a director’s sensibility matches the actor’s sensitivity, and that harmony between Donaldson and Collias is evident here.

Sam doesn’t talk much, in part because the men are more interested in their stories than hers; she watches. So much of the film relies on her eyes and on the kind of subtle shifts in expression that signal to us, if not the men, that she thinks they’re being a little ridiculous. Cinematographer Wilson Cameron brings us close to her expressions, which lets us into her head space. Sam is not an expressive or bubbly person, but her interior life is rich, and she is learning to trust her own judgment. We’re watching it happen.

If not for the rich natural setting, I could imagine Good One as an excellent stage play. The action is all in the shifting power dynamics between the three characters, sometimes mid-conversation. Like creatures undergoing metamorphosis, or trees growing rings with each passing year, we’re never static. Our relationships with the world around us change shape as we do, and our surroundings seem to change as we grow. For Sam, the camping trip marks a moment of transformation in her self-image. It might be the first such moment, but it won’t be the last.

Good One screened as a part of Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Alissa Wilkinson

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