What does it mean to be “good”? Who makes the choice that determines the standard? If you break from it to preserve yourself, does that automatically make you “bad”?
These are all common questions for adolescence, but most especially they are a matter of constant reckoning for teenage girls and women. It is expected, to some extent, that boys—and even adult men—are granted an allowance to buck against social reins. If they don’t, they are often looked at askance and punished in some way by others. Similarly, they will be cast out (however temporarily) for going too hard against the grain. Yet it is the direct opposite for young women. From before the time we are old enough to speak, women and girls are praised for and told the importance of being quiet and demure in the face of every conceivable situation. Our very survival is hard coded in acquiescence. Any break from the expectation gets us labeled and shunned so intensely it could ruin careers and lives. We’d have to go back hundreds, or even thousands, of years to figure out why women got the short end of that particular stick.
Writer/director/producer India Donaldson’s debut feature, GOOD ONE, interrogates the layers of expectation piled onto young women that they must juggle through the lens of an intimate moment in time—a weekend hiking trip between teenage Sam (Lily Collias), her father Chris (James Le Gros), and his longtime friend Matt (Danny McCarthy). The softest moment in an otherwise understatedly tense film comes in the form of a shared moment between Sam and her friend Jessie (Sumaya Bouhbal) as Sam is packing for the trip and happily explaining what each item is for as she goes. We learn that Sam is going on this trip while on her period, also. Perhaps not something to linger on in other hands, every moment it is brought to the forefront adds layers of depth to a story that is far more interested in depiction through action over words.
The film’s tension amps up as soon as Matt enters the picture and remains surprisingly relentless throughout. I did not go into GOOD ONE expecting a horror show, but that is, in a way, exactly what I got. Sam is consistently described as “wise beyond her years” and a “good one” that Chris is lucky to have turned out so well. It’s repeated, in one form or another, at some of the film’s tensest moments, a balm over barbed wire, though you may not realize that’s what’s happening without looking at Lily Collias’s face.
Sam aches to let her actual thoughts out, but when she tries she is dismissed outright or talked over—even when asked directly for her opinion. Collias’s performance is a masterful and all too personally familiar look at how many sticks it truly takes to break the “good ones” down. Connected with Wilson Cameron’s cinematography, we’re left with a push-pull conversation between the peace of nature and the barbed violence of humanity in one of its subtlest and most pervasive forms, that makes GOOD ONE both worth seeking out and worth using as a conversation piece.
There is a great deal going on just beneath the surface, and it’s a brilliant showcase of permission and rebellion through eyes most frequently overlooked. At once heartfelt and stifling, GOOD ONE says a great deal about masculinity, expectation, obedience, and rebellion in a way that transcends words. If the cost of being a “good one” is your own peace and serenity, then what’s the point?
GOOD ONE played at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, and is coming soon from Smudge Films.
Tags: Danny McCarthy, Good One, India Donaldson, James Le Gros, Lily Collias, Smudge Films, Sumaya Bouhbal, Sundance, Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival 2024, Wilson Cameron
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