Faced with a world that remains in constant and accelerating decay, it’s darkly humorous that a common rejoinder to expressions of despair has been the directive to go “touch grass.” Managing to be both healing yet woefully insufficient to resolving the ills of the world that await us when we return, this exercise in communing with the natural world is an escape as much as it is a gasp for salvation. In Good One, writer/director India Donaldson’s astounding debut feature film, the vast beauty of nature, with all its serene tranquility, provides no such easy salvation.
Donaldson’s film and the landscapes it explores, both topographical and emotional, are in tune with growth, regression, joy, and, ultimately, a crushing sadness of betrayal that can never be undone. This is something of a discovery for both the audience as well as for Sam (played by 2024’s best newcomer Lily Collias), as we are taken on a journey that begins in deceptively simple fashion before becoming something both deeper and darker.
As Sam attempts to enjoy a trip through the Catskills with her father, Chris (James Le Gros), and his messy longtime friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy), she is constantly talked down to, yet required to mind the egos of these fragile adult men. Though she’s on the cusp of going off to college and starting a life for herself, it is clear neither man is particularly interested in what she wants to do with her future. Instead, each wallows in their own past, constantly revealing their respective regrets. Matt is a dramatic has-been and failed actor turned salesman, something he carries with a heavy bitterness that he inflicts on all those around him—that is, when he isn’t drinking from the flask he has not-so-secretly brought along for the trip. He’s also more easygoing and funny than Chris, clashing with him over the course of the journey as they needle each other in a manner only partly playful.
Chris is also bitter about his job, which we feel in his silently exasperated reaction to the unseen text messages he gets that break through the solitude of nature, but he still wields a cruel sense of superiority over Matt whenever he can. He seems better when put alongside the other man—who, in the beginning of the film, childishly leaves his son behind rather than resolve their argument—but this is by design, as he constantly chastises his friend. He even uses Sam to castigate Matt when he brings food into his adjacent tent, yelling that he has put his daughter at risk. This empty protective posturing will soon reveal itself to be nothing but a sham.
Sam silently absorbs all of this with more than a little skepticism. In the quiet moments, Donaldson repeatedly holds the camera on her face as she processes a painful sliver of information she’s heard from the men. We see in her eyes a growing understanding of how small and self-centered the two adults are, though she also seems to genuinely enjoy aspects of the hike. That is, until it all comes crumbling apart before her.
Good One is the smallest of stories, playing out over a handful of days and with only a few characters, but refuses to shy away from the accumulating agonies that Sam must navigate entirely on her own. She’s smart—wise beyond her years, as the men like to point out—though still figuring out what it is that she wants and how she’ll navigate the world upon leaving home. There is a sense of finality to the trip even before its last night, as if this is all about to be etched into Sam’s memory for the rest of her life—a feeling which becomes inescapable once all the pieces fall into place.
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On that final night, the trio gather around a fire to bask in the excitement of arriving at the trip’s end and, in the case of the men as they both begin to drink, to also reckon with the sadness that they’ll soon be heading back home. Matt seems to be struggling most with this, reminiscing about the past as his many regrets come pouring out unabated. While this feeling was present throughout the trip, it was nearly always diffused with a joke about how Matt was very much not a hiker (even forgetting to bring a sleeping bag). Still, his behavior instilled the journey with a perpetual sense that he was breaking down and, ill-equipped to deal with that, capable of bringing others down with him.
After Chris wanders off early to go to sleep, one of the few times he’s left his daughter alone, Matt says that Sam should join him in his tent to keep him warm. No longer is this a joke about him missing his sleeping bag, but something threatening. He pushes the issue; the look of shock on her face only grows before she makes an excuse to go get water in order to get away. The next morning, she awakens and stares up at the top of her tent, with the camera lingering on the sight, as if taking a snapshot of the static safety of the ceiling after the dangerous turn of the prior evening. When the group silently packs up for the trip home, Donaldson observes the tranquil flow of the water and the beautiful way the sun gently reflects off its surface. Critically, this doesn’t offer any respite from what we’ve just observed. Rather, it’s this incongruity between the beauty of the world around us and the ugliness of the prior evening that ensures it cuts all the deeper. After an extended scene that Donaldson lets flow without words, the eventual inevitable conversation between father and daughter about what just happened is more frightening than anything that preceded it.
In the bright light of the day, Sam is abandoned by her father when she needs him the most. She tells him what Matt said and he initially brushes it off, insultingly making it about himself again with the petty squabble they were having about him forgetting a sleeping bag, though she doesn’t let him off the hook so easily. Then, in the most haunting moment of the film, he drops the pretense and pleads like a child that he just wants to have a nice day. Gone is the man who said he would protect her from anything, revealing how that was always self-serving and about his own ego. When Sam, with immense courage, tells him of a real danger from someone he knows, he caves. In that one conversation, we now know him for who he really is, and see how little he can be trusted. With only a few words, he has told his daughter he actually doesn’t really care about the situation, doesn’t want to be bothered with something that puts her in an unsafe position, and that he would rather just brush it under the rug. He has told her that she is truly and utterly on her own.
This is horrifying, but it’s also painfully familiar to anyone who has attempted to speak to a family member about the fear they have of someone who is their friend. Chris reacts in a way of denial at first, before disengaging entirely, something the film cuts straight to the agonizing core of. The patriarch had built up an idea of this trip and how wonderful it could be, so that anything threatening that idea—even the safety of his daughter—gets pushed aside. Instead of facing the fact that his friend is someone he needs to confront, or even just expressing support for his daughter, he locks it all away, a chilling act of compartmentalization that is common yet all the more terrifying because of how easily it can happen. It’s a rare thing for a film, truthfully but without judgment, to express the failing of a parent you love and who loves you so completely. We see fully the man that Chris believes himself to be—kind and caring for his daughter—come into conflict with who he actually is in this moment. The idealized version loses out, and might be someone that Sam is never able to trust to be there for her ever again.
After a delicate building up to this moment, Donaldson is decisive in how she captures it, no longer allowing her characters to dress up their flaws or put forth a facade about how much they care. Instead, all their empty pretenses are completely abandoned, and who they truly are is laid bare. This moment not only tears through the fabric of every scene that follows, but recolors every preceding one as well. The disrespect from father to daughter shown throughout the film was all building to this. When Chris says Sam must move to the back seat, or when Sam is expected, without discussion, to sleep on the floor of a hotel room while the two men take the beds, these interactions were about prioritizing them. It was always about their comfort and ease, no matter what.
We now see firsthand one of the reasons that can causes families to look away when children are harmed or even abused. It is, at least in part, about avoiding discomfort, even if that means failing the one person you’re meant to raise and protect. It’s far too often about preserving the idea of a peaceful life, where your children are safe and protected, at the expense of them actually being so, burying oneself in denial rather than confronting harder truths about the harm those we thought we could trust might have caused to those we care about. Sam is able to speak this aloud to her father, overcoming the struggles she is clearly having—struggles that we feel in every subtly shattering part of Collias’s performance—but her father can’t bring himself to overcome his own discomfort.
Donaldson doesn’t let us avoid this discomfort, either. Instead, she reveals how it has always been part of Chris and Sam’s relationship dynamic, and always will be. The way the father rarely stopped to truly listen to his daughter and frequently spoke over her—from the adults “joking” about how they were sure she was a vegetarian near the beginning to only asking how she is feeling about her future right at the very end—the clues to their crumbling relationships were always present. The weight of all these small moments eventually comes into better focus and obliterates the world we thought was being built, leaving us wandering with Sam in the rubble. The final night might have been the last straw, but it was there for us to see from the beginning, poisoning the picturesque landscapes we were taking in along the way. Even when Sam sets off on her own, away from two men she can no longer trust, to experience the vast beauty of nature all around her, it isn’t something that feels joyous. Instead, it’s deeply tragic, as this will now forever be the place where she saw her father for who he really was. We can see how she is capable of healing, rebuilding a life outside of them in ways they never could offer, yet this moment of overwhelming emotion is no less devastating. It’s a betrayal that will last a lifetime.
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By Good One‘s conclusion, we see how fundamentally everything has changed for this family. After leaving the two men behind with rocks that she slipped into their bags to make them heavier, Sam waits for them at the car. When they arrive, her father is angry and exasperated, while Matt says nothing. There is still no acknowledgement of what has happened; it becomes about their general grievances rather than the harm that was recently done.
As they pack their bags into the car, Sam is asked by her father to drive. It’s the closest he will come to addressing what happened, as he is reduced to begging for her to do so. This is played as his version of an apology, though really it is about getting forgiveness without earning it. That Sam agrees, only to lock them out for a brief moment, offers up an unexpected yet completely fitting moment of humor, conjuring up a feeling of amusement amidst the film’s quiet agony. After so many painful moments, this fleeting turn in their dynamic is cathartic, despite being nowhere near enough to shake the two grown men out of their complacency. Then again, it’s hard to imagine anything ever could.
This is what ultimately makes this ending, as an entire culmination of a growing cruelty, so effective. Sam scaring them a bit is a closing acknowledgement that they are not able to be reasoned with, that she can’t be the one to save them from themselves. No longer is she going along with all they have done and pretending that everything is okay. When she lets her father into the car, after he throws a petulant fit outside for a minute, she doesn’t say anything about it. Instead, he wordlessly puts a rock on top of the dash, seemingly one he’s found in his backpack that she’d put there. It’s a silent gesture of them both recognizing that she is no longer deferring to him on things, and will be putting distance between them as much as she can moving forward, while he has to drag along all the weight she’s left him with. This is his burden to bear now, and it’s something he will have to do alone. Even though they both came into the woods to touch grass, this final shot sends a different yet no less fitting final message: kick rocks.