Faiz Elahi
If someone told me that Good One is a fly-on-the-wall documentary, I would believe them. I watched a lot of stellar films in 2024, but none felt as true to me as this one. The film’s simplicity of sound, cinematography, and performance left me believing I was following three real people rather than three characters.
These people are the 17-year-old protagonist Sam, played incredibly by Lily Collias, a queer, seventeen-year-old girl. James Le Gros plays her father, Chris, who is divorced and has an infant with a very young woman. Danny McCarthy plays Chris’s friend, who is recently divorced and has a terrible relationship with his son. The two friends and their two children are to go on a camping trip in the Catskills. However, Matt’s son pulls out at the last minute. The film is just the three of them going on this camping trip. They drive to the trail, pack, hike, put up tents, cook, and enjoy the idyllic Catskills. That is the film. Nothing happens, but everything happens.
Three formal qualities create the low amplitude of Good One. First, its story is modest in scope and light in plot. The narrative is not propelled by conflict or tension. It does not rely on a big reveal, cathartic moment, or an emotional climax. Instead, Sam, Chris, and Matt just exist in their life as they go about this hike. This is just a moment in their lives. Because it does not need a clear narrative destination, Good One becomes a rich aesthetic representation of a regular human experience. Second, the modest scope of the narrative dictates that the film is made with formal restraint. The cinematography is simple, mostly static and handheld. The set design is plain and there are few locations. The score is often more ambient than it is melodic.
The modest plot and the formal restraint serve as the foundation for the defining aspect of the film: the “feeling protagonist.” Graham Wagner, a showrunner on the Amazon Prime TV Series Fallout, raised this concept on an episode of the podcast Script Apart by Al Horner. He distinguished between “action movie protagonists” and “art film protagonists.” The former “is a character that does the most things.” The latter is a “character that feels the most things.” Good One’s protagonist, Sam, does very little—just some regular tasks. What she feels is the narrative of the film, her transformation is a change in perspective.
Good One implements a light plot and formal restraint to create a feeling protagonist in Sam. The film’s smallness allows it to pack some larger, uncomfortable truths. The film also created a brief, convenient (for me) moment where Sam’s feelings transposed on to mine. For just that moment, she was real, and Good One brought me face-to-face with a disconcerting reality that I had implicitly understood, but never truly comprehended.
Good One’s truths start with its sparse but beautiful score. It is mimetic of the understated beauty of rolling trees, canopy, brook, hills, and hiking trails. The film is very comfortable with extended silences. There are several instances where we just see the characters climbing, cooking, sleeping, and swimming. The scenes are accompanied by an almost dreamlike sonic ambiance. The raw performances of the actors are accentuated by the sound. No flourishes are taking away from the truth of the matter here. We are following a teenager and two middle-aged men. What is the truth to be found here? What truths is Good One presenting to us?
There is a moment during the hike when the three reach the top of a rocky hill, from which they can view an idyllic vista. There is a gorgeous lake and trees. Although the film is exclusively from Sam’s perspective, this moment is observed from Chris and Matt’s viewpoint. The two men silently watch the lake.
The lake, to me, read as an allegory for the middle-aged man’s condition. That condition is one of quiet, numb, unresolved despair. Chris and Matt seem so sad, so battered down by circumstance and choice. They are idiotic, inconsiderate, funny, and affable. They are resentful, and their egos are fragile. Matt and Chris are pathetic, and they are so very human. Chris and Matt simultaneously reject Sam and accept her for femininity and queerness. The men are like the lake, presenting as still water, as unaffected by the rumblings underneath, because that is expected of them. Underneath is untold depths of dissatisfaction, unhappiness, envy, and regret.
Chris and Matt’s insecurity, the passive-aggressive envy they direct at each other, and their regret feel largely resonant within so many middle-aged men I have observed, none of whom are white American men. A middle-aged man’s internal suffering need not be due to poor relationship choices, like Chris and Matt. It could be about their career not panning out the way they wanted, their physical appearance going downhill, or realizing their kids don’t like them anymore. I can see myself and my friends, less than half their age, becoming like them if we are unlucky or not careful. Within the specificity of Chris and Matt’s portrayal in this film, their experience of masculinity and middle-age rung true.
Good One is not about the male experience, however. It just shows how men can be, which it does to better depict a facet of the female experience. Sam is the protagonist. She is a 17-year old queer girl. She is funny, sarcastic, independent, and holds her own. Sam has to step aside from her companions and find a secluded spot so she can change her tampons during the hike. She is just a person. We occupy her shoes during the runtime of the film.
The most important scene—the climax, if you will—is when Sam is forced to reckon with the reality that she is approaching womanhood even when she is still a teenager. Rather than a violent rupture of an event, Sam is inflicted by a pathetic microaggression, a meek proposition. A fun campfire conversation between the three devolves into a competition between Chris and Matt on who’s made the worse choices in life. Chris resentfully goes to sleep after the pissing contest, leaving his daughter with Matt. The two of them continue the conversation. As they talk about it, grown man and child, Matt eventually says that Sam has grown up into a woman. He says she is really mature for her age. He suggests that they sleep in the same tent.
We sit with this discomfort for what seems like an eternity. I expected a sonic indicator to emphasize the unsettling comment. But there is only the silence of the Catskills. The camera stays on Sam for this eternity as she internalizes what Matt has said to her. Matt has sucked the fun out of the trip. Matt may have just said some words. He never even moved his hands toward her. But he may as well have punched her in the gut. He may as well have punched me.
For me, this was the most unsettling scene of 2024—and I watched several of last year’s horror films. Good One so successfully put me within Sam’s perspective that Matt’s baffling proposition snuck up on me, like it did on Sam. The scene forced me to reckon with a reality that I only understood on paper. Matt unnerved Sam with a suggestion, a subtle, non-physical, subverting threat. It alluded to so much more. I have heard about the keys in the fingers, the rushing down the street, the shuffling to another side of the room, or asking the (trustworthy?) male friend to sit beside them in public transport. My mother and female friends have alluded and told me of these measures. For just this one scene, I felt the discomfort and fear that those measures stem from.
It was a moment of visceral empathy. I found my breath by the next scene. I will be fine, because I am mostly immune to this threat.
Following the scene, Sam’s coming-of-age is seen through two allegorical actions. First, Sam returns to the vista from earlier in the film. Now, we see it from her perspective. She sees an expanse of green hills rolling as far back as her eyes can see. Sam, at the precipice of adulthood, already a woman in the eyes of some, sees what seems to me that unending, unceasing threat. It will only get worse for Sam. This is evident by her father’s inadequate response when she tells him what happened the following morning. He questions it, doubts her, and in so doing his immediate response is a justification of Matt’s behavior. No big accusation and defense happen after this. Sam’s discomfort, Matt’s attempt at whatever it is he wanted from her is left unresolved.
Second, when Chris and Matt fall asleep later, Sam gathers some heavy rocks from around. She puts the rocks into Chris’ and Matt’s bags. While Sam adds the weight to get back at them, the rocks serve as a metaphor for the emotional baggage particular to men. The rocks are the burden that men carry. It is the weight of silently dealing with their circumstances and the resulting fallout of poor choices. One begets the other begets the other. It is the baggage of trying to live up to the patriarchal standards of masculinity. It is the shame of inevitably failing to live up to them. If Chris wants to do right by his daughter, he will have to start by unpacking his weight, unloading those rocks.
The film thus ends on a hopeful note. In the final shot, Chris looks into Sam’s eyes and puts one of the big rocks on the dashboard of their car.
Not long before I completed this essay, I was explaining it to a male friend. I explained why the film was important to me. I gave him the salient points. Then I narrated that climatic, unsettling scene. I told him what Matt did, to which he immediately asked, “But was that his intention?”
Intention? I narrated the scene as accurately as I could, and that’s his question?
I wanted to scream at him, shake him, smack him. He was barking up the wrong tree. He was in the wrong forest. But I didn’t do any of those things. His question was an admission that he couldn’t see it from Sam’s perspective. He couldn’t see beyond his familiar perspective as a man. He couldn’t understand that the intention is not the point. The point was the discomfort caused.
I could try mansplaining it to him for hours, but I knew it would be more productive, more appropriate even, to get him to watch Good One. India Donaldson and Lily Collias are showing the female perspective themselves. Regardless of how they present themselves, women have to cater to men in some way. Even when another man causes them emotional and/or physical distress, the woman has to be the good one.
