Written and directed by India Donaldson, the movie follows 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias) going on an excursion in the Catskills along with her father Chris (James Le Gros) and his friend Matt (Danny McCarthy). A trip to the heart of the woods that naturally exposes each character's anxieties as they tread different paths in their lives. Wiser than her age, Sam is presented as observant whose mood goes from taciturn to enthusiastically playful to earnestly mature. Donaldson's attention to detail traces behavioral nuances that subtly illustrate shadings of perception that never depart from the natural and realistic. Dialogues weaving seamlessly without requiring inauthentic drama allows us to feel not only invested in what is happening, but also part of it.
According to Donaldson, the idea was born from her own experiences growing up and going camping with her father and his friends. Her debut length feature is, at its core, a character study that is interested in an immersive contemplative experience through the eyes of someone whose sensitivity might not be shared, not because of differences in what constitutes moral values, but because of a displacement in presumptions. By reason of the object of perception not being equally perceived, different readings of it are born. A decisive event in the movie articulates this difference in interpellation and renders what came before, our being with these characters and making our own assumptions after the time spent, something needing to be recontextualized.
It would be tempting to see in Good One anything but a reproduction of ideological discourses where the lines between good and evil are clearly drawn, and by doing so, something that voids reality from its complexities. Nonetheless, its non-judgmental approach is more interested in exposition than it is in lecturing. This is a story grounded in believable events and as such, said line could not be further from being drawn no matter how questionable some remarks might be interpreted.
