This evaluation is a part of our protection of the 2024 Sundance Movie Competition.
The Pitch: Sam (Lily Collias) is smart past her years, a 17-year-old lady with a stable head on her shoulders and an innate capability to note and observe these round her. She’s set to go on a three-day hike within the Catskills along with her fiftysomething type-A dad, Chris (James Le Gros), and his snarky lifelong good friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy). Each males are divorced — Chris years prior, with a brand new youthful spouse now, whereas Matt is in the midst of his personal messy separation — and Matt’s son decides final minute to duck out of the journey, nonetheless offended at his dad.
That leaves Sam alone with these two older males, who trek by means of the woods bumping egos and ruminating on their previous glories and current failures. All of the whereas, Sam listens, observes, and serves as an unwitting arbitrator to those males’s furtive grasps at profundity. It’s a quiet, unassuming journey that can make Sam have a look at each males in irrevocable new methods.
How Did You Get So Sensible? In its opening minutes, author/director India Donaldson’s characteristic debut lulls you right into a false sense of safety — the plaintive folk-guitar soundtrack, Wilson Cameron’s lush, vivid cinematography capturing the verdant greens and babbling brooks of the Catskill Mountains. It’s an equilibrium echoed in Sam’s perspective: Collias performs her as quiet and observant, perpetually in a position to navigate her passive-aggressive father’s emotional and sensible wants — a talent she’s clearly developed over time. For ladies like Sam, being the “good one” within the household is greater than collegiality; it’s a survival mechanism that performs out within the delicate verbal tugs of warfare all through the movie.
Like Sam, Donaldson lets the varied dramas of Good One play out within the rat-a-tat conversations between Chris and Matt, two guys who fall into a well-recognized fraternal dynamic even after many years of life decisions and stunted ambitions. Chris is the quintessential Mountain climbing Dad, obsessive about correct backpacking procedures whereas he presses others to do what he needs. Matt, in the meantime, is an out-of-shape jerk who’s clearly coasted on frat-boy allure by means of his life, dealing with the myallmoviess of his errors.
Halfway by means of the movie, they intercept a trio of youthful guys who arrange camp with them; the environment virtually stinks with testosterone as the 2 older males come face-to-face with the boys they’d so clearly wish to be once more. There’s a type of pathetic relatability to those two guys, males who by no means thought they’d should develop previous and who don’t actually know what to do now that they’re there. Le Gros and McCarthy play these notes effectively, the lingering embers of a tightknit friendship examined by their very own innate cowardice.
Strolling Is Cool. I Love Strolling: In the course of all of it is Collias, a superb, self-possessed performer whose biggest talent lies in her capability to hearken to her scene companions. Her probing eyes and wry smile evoke a younger Winona Ryder, whereas hiding swells of inside ache and betrayal like Sidney Flanigan in By no means Not often Typically All the time. Each gesture, each line carries immense psychological weight behind it, promoting the journey of a lady realizing that there’s little security or reward for simply going with the stream. Few actors command a lot curiosity whereas outwardly doing so little, and that’s a testomony to Collias’ interiority and Donaldson’s clear command of actors.
It helps, after all, that the script is loping and naturalistic in all the appropriate methods, teasing out small however profound particulars in regards to the lives of quiet desperation its characters reside. The forest is an ideal option to get away from all of it, however Good One helps the concept you merely carry all these demons into the wilderness with you. By the point the complete film activates a single scene — a single line, even — you scarcely discover it’s coming, identical as Sam. And the quiet fallout from that second is haunting, one born not of confrontation however of inaction.
The Verdict: It’s tempting to come back to Sundance on the lookout for large, explosive debuts that cry out to be seen, that includes showy performances from large stars or idiosyncratic tonal or style swings. Good One provides the other of that, a film that retains all its combustion tightly coiled and contained. From the get, Donaldson has an incredible command of tempo and silence, laying the desperation of center age (and the way it seems to be to these whose lives are nonetheless forward of them) naked with little greater than a gesture or a closeup. It’s a killer debut for each her and Collias, and it will likely be thrilling to see what each can do with the momentum an image like this will present.
The place to Watch: Good One premiered on the 2024 Sundance Movie Competition. Distribution is pending.
