Good One is a quiet, sharply observed coming-of-age drama about a 17-year-old caught between two adults on a camping trip. Lily Collias gives the film its center as Sam: attentive to every shift in mood, quick to smooth over tension, and gradually less willing to treat the men’s needs as her responsibility. India Donaldson’s feature debut finds its force in those small changes rather than in a plot-heavy turning point.
What is Good One about?
Sam (Lily Collias) joins her father, Chris (James Le Gros), and his longtime friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) for a backpacking trip in the Catskills. Matt’s son, who would usually be part of the outing, is absent, leaving Sam as the only teenager in the group. The trip’s close quarters and outdoor routine make it harder for the adults’ tensions to stay in the background.
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The premise is simple, but the film’s attention is precise. Sam listens, watches, and makes little efforts to keep the peace. The story is less interested in explaining her than in showing what she notices—and how her understanding of the relationships around her shifts.
Lily Collias makes Sam’s quiet legible
Collias’s performance is built from small shifts: a pause before responding, a change in where Sam directs her attention, or the look of someone deciding whether to intervene. These choices make her quiet feel active. Sam is not simply along for the trip; she is tracking the emotional weather and adjusting herself to it.
#1 Best Overall
That attentiveness is also the source of the film’s unease. The adults may take Sam’s composure for ease, but Collias lets the viewer see the work behind it. Her changing reactions register discomfort and a more complicated view of the relationships she has trusted. The performance never has to announce that change for it to land.
What the title means
“Good one” sounds like uncomplicated praise, but Donaldson has described a sharper undertone. In a BFI Sight and Sound interview published May 16, 2025, the writer-director said: “For me, it has a double meaning. It’s a phrase that the character Matt uses to describe Sam which is intended as a compliment but there’s a painful significance to her.”
Rank #2
The phrase matters because being agreeable can earn approval while quietly narrowing a young person’s room to refuse, object, or disappoint someone. The film keeps that tension particular to Sam and this trip; it does not turn her experience into a universal diagnosis.
Silence, listening, and the pressure of the trip
Good One gives pauses and listening as much weight as dialogue. Donaldson told BFI, “Listening in particular was a guiding theme in the whole process.” In the film, listening is not the same as passivity: Sam’s attention lets her register what is happening even when she does not immediately answer it.
The landscape provides space, but not escape from the group’s dynamics. Donaldson told Sundance, “There’s something about being isolated on a camping trip or trapped on a road trip that lays relationship dynamics bare.” Here, the physical demands and shared routines of a backpacking trip keep the characters together as their tension becomes harder to ignore. Naturalistic dialogue and stretches of quiet let small shifts carry more weight than a conventional dramatic score of revelations would.
Why the understated approach works
The film’s coming-of-age movement is compressed into a short period and a charged relationship shift, rather than spread across a sequence of milestones. TIME critic Stephanie Zacharek has framed it as a delicate story about the burden of kindness and empathy; The Atlantic’s Shirley Li emphasizes how a brief stretch of time and one charged conversation can compress a coming-of-age change. Those are individual critical readings, but both point to the film’s method: it asks viewers to notice how a relationship feels different before anyone spells out exactly why.
Rank #4
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BFI critic Katherine McLaughlin highlights the film’s naturalistic dialogue, silence, and generational and gendered tensions. Donaldson’s interest in Mike Leigh is discussed in the BFI interview; BFI’s comparison of the film’s naturalistic qualities with work by Kelly Reichardt and Leigh is a critical frame, not evidence of a direct influence. The useful comparison is about form: Good One trusts observation and subtext over plot machinery.
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| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Festival listing year and runtime | 2023; 90 minutes, according to the Sundance listing. Later theatrical-release context is associated with 2024. |
| Festival presentation | 2024 Sundance U.S. Dramatic Competition. |
| Writer and director | India Donaldson, whose feature debut this is; Sundance lists her as writer, director, and co-producer. |
| Sam’s age | 17, according to Sundance’s listing and interview. |
| Selected credits | Producers Diana Irvine, Graham Mason, Wilson Cameron, and India Donaldson; cinematography by Wilson Cameron; editing by Graham Mason; original music by Celia Hollander. |
The Sundance player marks its festival stream unavailable or expired. That does not establish whether the film is currently available to stream or rent elsewhere; viewing options vary by region and can change.
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