Reviewed on May 24th at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival – Directors’ Fortnight Section. 89 Mins
Cast: Lily Collias, Sumaya Bouhbal, Valentine Black
Genre: Drama
Director: India Donaldson
In Irish Cinemas: 16th May 2025
Parents? In Good One, writer and first-time director India Donaldson captures the creeping disillusionment that arises when young people realise the adults in their lives are often no wiser, just older. This reckoning is intensified through the film’s incisive portrayal of heteronormative gender roles and quiet domestic dysfunction. The story follows Sam (Lily Collias), a queer teenager who reluctantly joins her father Chris (James Le Gros) and his recently divorced best friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) on a weekend camping trip. The trip is initially meant to include Matt’s son Dylan (Julian Grady) as a peer for Sam, but Dylan, still reeling from his parents’ breakup, opts out at the last minute. Sam is left as the lone teenager among two middle-aged men trying to escape their midlife failures in the guise of rugged recreation.
What begins as a seemingly benign outdoor getaway quickly devolves into something more quietly suffocating. Rather than enjoying the trip, Sam becomes the unofficial caretaker and mediator, responsible for navigating the trail, managing gear, solving tent mishaps, tending to her health, and silently buffering the tension between the two men. She’s not merely a third wheel; she’s the unacknowledged glue holding the fragile dynamics together. The film subtly critiques the way men, under the guise of being affable or easygoing, can deflect responsibility and dump emotional labour on the nearest woman, regardless of her age.
The title Good One evolves in significance as the narrative unfolds. On one level, Sam becomes “the good one”—the capable, compliant daughter who picks up the slack and smooths over cracks, likely a role she’s long inhabited. On another, it references the recurring phrase tossed between Chris and Matt—“good one”—used to punctuate their offhand, sometimes tone-deaf jokes. It becomes a catch-all response, a way to avoid uncomfortable self-reflection, to deflate tension without resolving it. It’s a verbal shrug masquerading as camaraderie, revealing the emotional stagnation of men who’ve never been forced to grow up.
Lily Collias’s performance is quietly devastating, marked by a restrained emotional intelligence that vividly brings Sam’s inner world to life. Through subtle glances, pauses, and silences, she reveals the painful paradox of being treated simultaneously as a child and as someone old enough to shoulder adult burdens. Sam’s queerness adds another dimension to her outsider status, underscoring how much sooner she has come to terms with identity, emotional labour, and self-awareness than those around her. The film doesn’t depict a moment of awakening for Sam; she sees the shortcomings of the adults from the outset. The tragedy is that she remains powerless to shift the dynamics, unable to find allies or tools to challenge the roles thrust upon her.
Donaldson’s minimalist, naturalistic script allows space for these emotional undercurrents to breathe. The film’s semi-wilderness setting reinforces its themes: the forest, often romanticised as a place for growth and clarity, becomes a stage for denial and performative masculinity. Donaldson suggests that neither nature nor nurture can foster maturity when people refuse to confront themselves. Experience, she argues, does not equal growth—not if one is unaware or unwilling to change.
Stylistically, Good One draws on the aesthetic and tonal hallmarks of early 2010s American indie cinema, with its loose, quasi-mumblecore dialogue and restrained pacing. For some viewers, the lack of tonal variety and a dramatic climax may feel anti-climactic or elusive. But the film’s quietude is deceptive: underneath its soft textures lies a simmering critique of interpersonal negligence and casual misogyny. At its core, Good One is both an empathetic character study and a sharp indictment of the emotional ineptitude inherited and perpetuated by men. Like a tick picked up on a hike, its effects are subtle at first, lingering, persistent, and impossible to ignore.
Overall: 7/10
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