Good One: a father-daughter camping trip turns sour in this beautifully observed debut

The first feature by writer-director India Donaldson makes a virtue of simplicity. It’s set over the course of three days, and for the most part three characters share the screen. Chris – played by indie stalwart James Le Gros – is in his mid-50s, and now embarked on a second family, with a new, much younger wife. Matt (Danny McCarthy) is his oldest friend, a struggling actor, freshly divorced, and spiralling. Then there’s 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias), Chris’s daughter from his first marriage.

Matt’s teenage son is supposed to be joining them on a weekend camping trip in the Catskill Mountains, but bails at the last minute, another dent to his father’s battered ego. That leaves Sam as the odd one out, as umpire, audience, even fleetingly as the centre of attention.

On paper the guys are familiar types: earnest, anal and neurotic, Chris has planned everything down to the last half-ounce in his backpack. Matt, on the other hand, is lugging quantities of booze and weed, but neglects to bring a sleeping bag. The odd couple dynamic recalls Sideways (2004) and a whole subgenre of movie comedy, but Donaldson doesn’t squeeze the jokes too hard; the film has a natural, affectless air and she isn’t afraid to ease us into the relationships. While Sam and Matt aren’t strangers, the men’s friendship stretches back before she was born, and she’s learning about the young man her dad used to be, and her mom too, from their reminiscences.

When the movies take us into the backwoods there is almost always trouble ahead, whether in the form of witches, rednecks, the evil undead or cocaine bears. The trailer for Good One teases just such an expectation from a brief encounter with three young men who pitch a tent close by… an incident Donaldson sets up less for presumptive horror than to underline the generation gap between Sam and her dually embarrassing adoptive ‘dads’.

In what is essentially a reactive, listening role, Lily Collias is the focal point for Donaldson’s close-ups, an index by which our sympathies are guided gently from the tightly wound, insensitive Chris towards the anguished Matt – McCarthy generates a certain screwed-up underdog charm from his train-wreck self-pity. Neither man is a monster, but they are pompous and pathetic, and they tend to talk at each other, while it’s up to Sam to respond with a modicum of care and compassion. Donaldson also makes sure we note who is dishing up the noodles and who’s cleaning up the plates afterwards too (you won’t need three guesses).

After this gentle, rather uneventful build-up, the relentless banter, barbs and cross-talk alleviated intermittently by welcome cutaways to shots of natural beauty and repose, Donaldson calmly orchestrates her pièce de résistance, an extended 13-minute campfire scene that is another virtual non-event in plot terms, but which rumbles and reverberates powerfully throughout the movie’s angry and rebellious – but predominantly silent – third act.

Donaldson’s masterstroke is to place the turn on the back of a sequence where the two men have been at their most vulnerable and sympathetic, sharing weed and confessions. Alone after Chris has turned in, high, and sensing that he’s touched the kid with his sad-sack stories, Matt makes a pass at his friend’s 17-year-old. She registers and firmly rejects it, and it’s over in seconds. Except of course it’s not, because how could it be? And when she tells her dad the next morning, the initial act of betrayal is exacerbated ten-fold by his response, which is to make excuses for his buddy.

There’s a Raymond Carver quality to Donaldson’s approach (we might be reminded of another camping trip, in Carver’s story ‘So Much Water, So Close to Home’, which found its way into Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, 1993). Like Carver – and like Sam in this film – she observes closely, listens intently, and through this intense scrutiny of seemingly mundane behaviour arrives at profound truths her characters – the men, anyway – elect to ignore.

In other words, Good One is a backwoods horror film after all – even if there’s no physical violence. It’s a horror film in which nothing much happens, but for Sam the world is turned upside down.

► Good One is in UK cinemas 16 May.