You either see it coming or you don’t. In Good One, the poignant debut feature from 41-year-old director India Donaldson, a pivotal moment occurs towards the end of the film, a turning point that’s largely predicted by women, not so much by men. “I wasn’t trying to hide what’s going to happen,” says Donaldson. “I’m interested in both responses. We bring our personal experiences to our filmgoing life.”
I’m speaking to Donaldson at BFI Southbank at the London Film Festival, shortly before the UK premiere of Good One. She’s arrived from Los Angeles without a publicist – after I struggle to spot her by typing her name into Google Images, we find each other via a phone call – and is sat undisturbed in a bar amidst cinephiles. Once the credits roll, though, audiences are full of questions. “I’ve had really cool conversations after screenings with dads and adult daughters, which I didn’t anticipate,” she says. “Men are like, ‘OK, I’m reflecting on something.’ It’s heartening when they say it registered for them.”
The smart, subtle, coming-of-age drama stars Lily Collias as Sam, a 17-year-old girl heading out to the Catskills for a camping trip with her father, Chris (James Le Gros), and Chris’s divorced buddy, Matt (Danny McCarthy). Fleshing out the characters through their distinct, believable interactions, Donaldson’s screenplay maps out a dynamic whereby two middle-aged men awkwardly make small talk with a queer teen who cooks the food and listens to their love life woes. In other words, Sam is a lesbian child who slots into the stereotypical role of a mother in a heteronormative family unit.
“She’s taking on these traditional roles like maid, mother, and caretaker,” says Donaldson. “I wanted her queerness to be nothing and everything. So much of her identity is invisible to these men. They’re not judgemental of it, per se, but they’re not attuned to the nuances of her lived experience.” When Sam’s sexuality is referenced, it’s Chris and Matt joking that she’ll be safe from the advances of men. “Even with her queerness, they’re projecting onto her. She points out, ‘It’s the only question you’ve asked me all weekend.’ They’re not curious about her. They need her to cook, clean, listen, entertain. But they’re not thinking about what she needs.”
Prior to Good One, Donaldson had only directed shorts. She’d been concentrating on getting a different feature into production and was part of a TV writing staff in 2020. When neither project went ahead in the pandemic, she drew on her childhood memories of camping for a screenplay that she knew would require few actors and a minimal budget. Subsequently, Good One is an intimate piece of filmmaking that utilises the sound design of nature. Two key influences were Annie Baker (“I love her plays”) and Kelly Reichardt (“you want to be immersed in her world”), but the details distinctly belong to Donaldson.
It’s a contemporary story about this universal shift from childhood to adulthood. That shift happens internally, but it’s also out of your control at a certain point. You can’t control how the world treats you
So much so, the script specified the order in which the trio of characters walked, or the positions in which they sat around a table. After all, Good One is a drama about unspoken power dynamics: when Chris and Matt exchange anecdotes for several minutes, the viewer’s focus is on Sam, the silent witness, and her micro-shifts of emotion. Nevertheless, the masterstroke of Donaldson’s direction and casting is that Chris and Matt are, on the whole, warm, jovial personalities, not villains. “I really liked these two men, and I enjoyed being with them,” says Donaldson. “It didn’t feel hard to write them.”
Moreover, it’s Chris and Matt’s likeability that makes the aforementioned incident – it won’t be spoiled in this article – more devastating when it unfolds in the third act. Technically, in screenwriting terms, the “inciting incident” should occur in the first 20 minutes, rather than 20 minutes from the end. Donaldson thus knew she was breaking storytelling rules with Good One. “It wasn’t an easy film to get financed,” she says. “I was interested in inverting the narrative. The effects of it rippled backwards instead of forwards.”
Good One marks Collias’s first movie role – she’s since been cast in an A24 horror, as is customary for all American actors of note – and she’s such a natural fit for Sam, it can feel like a documentary to watch the character trudge through leaves, prepare meals over a campfire, or simply navigate her older male counterparts. “I was looking for a young actor who felt authentic, who could bring a depth to the silence,” says Donaldson. “There’s a risk when you write a young, female character who doesn’t say as much as the men around her, that they come across as weak or passive. Lily is anything but that. She imbues the character with an edge.”
On Instagram, Donaldson has posted pictures of herself from the year 2000 as a teen camping with her father, Roger Donaldson, a filmmaker who directed Tom Cruise in Cocktail. However, Donaldson was keen for Good One to be a modern movie: Sam maintains regular contact with a friend through her phone; while the men’s behaviour isn’t perfect, they feel pressure to uphold certain standards around someone they consider to be Gen Z. “It’s a contemporary story about this universal shift from childhood to adulthood,” says Donaldson. “That shift happens internally, but it’s also out of your control at a certain point. You can’t control how the world treats you.”
Ultimately, Good One is a movie that feels like it’s depicting a young girl discovering something about herself. After more consideration, though, it’s apparent that Sam is as self-assured by the end of the film as she was at the start; all her lessons are to do with the men around her. “I don’t want to spoil anything,” says Donaldson. “But she’s being exposed to the way people are, and will continue to be, throughout her adult life. It’s not a profound revelation. It’s a quiet one that will have ripple effects throughout her life.”
Good One is out in UK cinemas now.
