Good One (India Donaldson, 2024) (Patreon)

Above is the lone film still available for India Donaldson's Sundance premiere Good One. This is unfortunate, because I want to talk about a very specific scene at the start of the film's final third. The three hikers -- Sam (Lily Collias), her father Chris (James Le Gros), and his friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) arrive at a clearing beside a stream. All around the stream we see small cairns made from smooth rocks, collected from in and around the stream. These mark the earlier presence of other hikers, and none of the characters in Good One remark upon them or disturb them. 

If you read various nature and wildlife manuals, they strongly advise hikers against collecting rocks and making cairns. Different species live under rocks, or hide from predators beneath them, so by moving the rocks, one is altering the ecosystem along the hiking trail. In Good One, the fact of seeing so many cairns around the stream allows us to mark time. What Sam and the men are doing, dozens of other people have done in the recent past. And what they are doing is detrimental to the environment they presumably care about.

At the beginning of Good One, we learn that this hike is one of a number of excursions Sam and her father have taken over the years. Although we do not know for certain whether this is the last, we do know that she's now 18, in what appears to be a serious relationship, and will soon be leaving for college. So there is reason to see this trip as valedictory for father and daughter. And during this trip, Sam is able to see her father for exactly who he is: a genial know-it-all who does not have her back when she is most in need of help. 

So in the very simplest sense, Good One is about a family relationship that breaks apart over the course of a long weekend. When Sam leaves the men behind and finishes the hike by herself, she hasn't just gained adult independence but been forced into it, because of her father's limitations. So she breaks away, finds her own path, etc. but in a more decisive, even absolute way. Good One is about the way fathers disappoint daughters, and how a young girl's identity is partly formed in the crucible of this disappointment.