Good One review: This low-key coming-of-age drama is a sneaky revelation
Good One
Director
:
India Donaldson
Cert
:
None
Genre
:
Comedy
Starring
:
Lily Collias, James Le Gros, Danny McCarthy
Running Time
:
1 hr 29 mins
India Donaldson's Good One is a sneaky revelation, a low-key coming-of-age drama that deftly sidesteps familiar tropes in favour of keen cringe comedy and emotional precision.
Set against the verdant backdrop of the Catskill Mountains, in New York State, the film follows 17-year-old Sam (the remarkable Lily Collias, in a breakout performance) as she joins her father, Chris (James Le Gros), and his long-time friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) on what was supposed to be a four-person hiking trip.
When Matt's resentful son bails, Sam finds herself an unwilling third wheel to two middle-aged man babies marinating in nostalgia, insecurities and unacknowledged failures.
Spooky campfire tales descend into stories of postdivorce resentment. A meal at a roadside diner culminates in food shaming. 'I've never been a vegetarian,' Sam explains patiently. 'But you seem like one,' Dad replies.
READ MORE
Under the guise of banter, Matt teases Sam about her queerness; Chris demeans her driving. The passive-aggressive barbs come thick and fast while Sam is left to cook the ramen, dismantle the tent and act as unofficial umpire.
Her parentalised status is finally acknowledged in a moment of toe-curling inappropriateness. All subsequent attempts to flag the disconcerting incident are brushed off, leaving the weary heroine to enact a deliciously petty revenge.
Donaldson, a first-time writer, director and producer, has written a fiendishly clever script enlivened by a quick-witted ensemble cast. Collias, who can do more with a raised eyebrow than most actors can manage with a soliloquy, brings exasperated pathos to every reaction shot and pregnant silence. The cinematographer Wilson Cameron frames the bickering and multiple microaggressions with serene woodlands, rushing rivers and tranquil hillsides.
This sly, observant debut – a critical wow at both Sundance and Cannes last year – channels the bittersweetness of Kelly Reichardt's snappier moments, but from the youthful perspective of an eye-rolling teenager staring into the abyss of male privilege.
In cinemas from Friday, May 16th
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Irish Times
13 hours ago
- Irish Times
‘I fell for the horny married man playing the nice guy routine'
Dear Roe, I met a man, we had a fling over a weekend. He had a ring, and I asked, but he told me he was divorced, then separated. Then this got a bit vague. Towards the end of the weekend he told me he had children, and also that as we lived a good distance apart, he didn't see our relationship continuing. I was a little bit 'WTF?' to say the least. Sure there was sex, but we had an emotional connection and emotional intimacy, and he seemed to just switch that off when he mentioned his children and thought of home. Is he just a married playboy? Am I not stepmother material in his eyes? What gets me is this 'nice guy' really questioned me. He was honest with some probing questions, but why lie? I would have told him to F-off had he said he was married, so he just fed me his lines nicely packaged. I fell for the horny married man playing the nice guy routine and he gets out, trying not to make himself or me feel bad. Or maybe he wasn't even married and the ring is just a prop to get out of a relationship? He played me. There isn't technically a question here, but let's go along with this dynamic where you have good old-fashioned rant about a man to me as if we're friends at a bar – except I'm going to give you some harsher truths than a friend would, not out of judgment but out of care. Because sure, it sounds like this guy played you. But you also played yourself. And you deserve better. [ After seven years, I'm afraid my boyfriend won't ever propose Opens in new window ] You talk about emotional connection and intimacy, and seem very hurt by the fact that this man didn't take you seriously as a romantic prospect in the long term. This tells me that you do value the idea of a serious relationship, and I want you to be able to find that. But you also have very warped ideas about what a serious relationship entails, and these ideas are causing you to act in ways that are out of alignment with your goals. READ MORE A weekend fling is just that. It's not a relationship. It's not commitment. It's a contained experience of heightened excitement and intensity and attention and sexual chemistry – and all of these things are great. It's the reason holiday romances and short-lived connections are so intoxicating. You're both separated from the humdrum of normal life and its responsibilities, you can lavish each other with nonstop attention, you can tell each your deepest truths, and have endless sex in hotel rooms – and none of it is interrupted by bills or work or kids or simply real-life evidence that refutes their grand declarations that they live for adventure and beauty when actually they're a bit rigid and complacent and have deep-seated mother issues. A fling is about fantasy. You can present yourself as the most sexy, sparkling, soulful version of yourself, and the other person can do the same, and you both invest in the fantasy that you would be able to maintain this level of passionate intensity in the real world. But when the weekend ends and Monday rolls around with its work meetings and, in this case, wives waiting at home with the kids, the fantasy ends. [ 'I'm a married woman but my work crush is getting complicated' Opens in new window ] This man is a liar and a player and I feel deeply sorry for his wife, who is the real victim here. And I understand that you feel hurt and betrayed and disappointed that this man lied to you, slept with you, and revealed himself to be uninterested in anything real with you. But you are also giving away way too much of your power, and only when you reclaim that will you start to make better choices and move towards the life you want. You did not behave like someone who was interested in anything real. You are an adult with agency and choice, and you made choices on this weekend. You chose to go along with a fantasy from the very beginning and are now acting like you were blindsided by his betrayal, when the bigger – and thankfully, more fixable – issue is that you betrayed yourself. If you want something real, you don't get to skip all the work and simply assume it will be delivered to you in a weekend fling like room service If you want something real, don't entertain men with wedding rings, even if he says he's divorced, because either he's lying or he's divorced but still wearing his wedding ring, and either scenario tells you very clearly that he is not emotionally available or ready for a serious relationship. If you want something real, understand that takes time and commitment, and work to build it with someone. You need to get to know each other, experience real life things together, and see how you navigate life's challenges together. If you want something real, you don't simply believe what someone tells you over three days and invest your life's dreams into their unproven words. If you want something real, you don't get to skip all the work and simply assume it will be delivered to you in a weekend fling like room service. Which brings us to your 'Am I not stepmother material in his eyes?' question. Let me be very, very clear: no one – and I mean no one – should let someone who believes that a weekend fling proves they are 'stepmother material' (whatever that means) anywhere near their children. This is where your fantasy life isn't just threatening to hurt you, but other people, because the truth is, you have a big blind spot when it comes to what real commitment is and actually requires – in romance, let alone in parenting. And until you see it clearly, you'll keep getting stuck in versions of this same story. Real love and parenthood have a lot of the same qualities. They're often unglamorous and demand deep stability, strong values, clear communication, strong boundaries, emotional regulation and a deep commitment to someone else's life beyond your own. That doesn't come out of a fling. That comes from building a relationship brick by brick, with time, truth and mutual effort. And if you really want that kind of life - a real partnership, maybe even a family - you've got to stop thinking that wanting it is the same as being ready for it. You've got to get curious about your own expectations. Why do you attach so fast? Why do you equate a weekend of emotional openness with long-term potential? Why do you invest in fantasy over committing to the work and rewards of reality? This isn't judgment. It's a wake-up call. Because you are worthy of love, and partnership, and maybe even a family of your own some day. But only if you're willing to get honest about the difference between fantasy and reality, and do the internal work required to show up for the real thing when it comes. That's when you'll stop chasing emotionally unavailable men and start choosing people who are actually ready to build something with you. This weekend didn't prove anything about your worth or your potential. It just showed you where you need to do the work - on boundaries, on self-trust, on not mistaking intensity for intimacy. And that work? It's not sexy. But it's real. And it's where actual love begins. So have your rant. Finish your drink. Then let this man be exactly what he is: a mirror for what you no longer want, and a lesson you never have to repeat. .form-group {width:100% !important;}
The Irish Sun
21 hours ago
- The Irish Sun
Robbie Williams goes head to head with Beyonce in pop superstars' North London derby
THE North London derby typically sees a clash between football rivals Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur. But this weekend's version saw Robbie Williams go head to head with Beyonce at the clubs' home grounds. 11 Robbie played the third night of his Britpop Tour at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium Credit: 11 Beyonce played at Tottenham's stadium for her Cowboy Carter Tour Credit: Instagram The Angels hitmaker kicked off the third night of his Britpop Tour at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium last night. While just four miles away, Queen B played at Tottenham's £1.2billion stadium for her Cowboy Carter Tour. And Port Vale fan Robbie could not resist adding some rivalry at his gig on Friday night. During a singalong to Bon Jovi's Livin' On A Prayer, he told his fans: 'You won't get that at a f***ing Beyonce gig.' READ MORE ON ROBBIE WILLIAMS Robbie, who paid homage to his 1995 Glastonbury Festival look in a red stripe tracksuit, said he was 'anxious' in the run-up to his 38-date tour. He said: 'I turned to my wife [Ayda] in rehearsals and said: 'Babe, I'm anxious about this'. 11 'She said, 'Rob, you behave like this is normal, you behave like you have to do this for the rest of your life, you behave like stadiums is where you should be'. 'In that moment, it changed my perception.' Most read in Bizarre But it seemed all the nerves had disappeared when Robbie was joined by Nineties boyband Five to sing their hit Keep On Movin', marking their first stage appearance in 25 years. And boyband fans were equally delighted when Lulu appeared on stage with Robbie to sing Take That's hit Relight My Fire. Is Beyonce's NFL Christmas Gameday show free to watch on Netflix or do I need to buy a Texans-Ravens pay-per-view? However, 35 years since he joined Take That as a baby-faced teen, Robbie said fans are now offering him 'Werther's Originals' instead of ripping off his clothes. He said: 'I might be in sniper's alley — but I believe I have got a lot longer on this runway to go. 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Irish Times
2 days ago
- Irish Times
Re-reading my teenage diaries: joy and pain radiates off the pages
I didn't realise it at the time, but I came of age at the very end of an era. As someone who was born in the 1970s, I turned out to be part of the very last generation of habitual letter writers. For centuries, people with the means and the education had left written traces of themselves behind. Some wrote diaries; almost all wrote letters. When I started college in 1993, letters were the only way of keeping in touch with faraway friends. But then, incredibly quickly, everything changed. During my college years I wrote dozens of letters – letters to friends on Erasmus or summers abroad, letters from my own summers in Berlin and Boston. Sometimes I abandoned a letter and left it unfinished, tucked inside a notebook or folder pad, because so much had happened since I started writing it, the letter was out of date. But in the summer of 1997, just after I graduated, I got my first email address. And letters vanished from my life completely. While I was writing those letters, I also kept a diary, documenting my life (or more accurately, my extremely dramatic feelings about my life) in a series of ring-bound notebooks. For decades those unfinished letters and diaries were hidden away in my wardrobe and in a box in my parents' house. Until last summer, when I unearthed them and found myself travelling back in time. My first novel for adults, Our Song, is the story of Tadhg and Laura, who were bandmates in college before their friendship ended acrimoniously when they were 21. Sixteen years later their lives are very different – Tadhg is a massively successful musician, while Laura's just been laid off from her advertising job. But then Tadhg contacts Laura and asks her to finish a song they started writing together in their college days. The novel's narrative moves between the older Tadhg and Laura as they rediscover their old musical and personal chemistry, and the story of their younger, messier selves. And that's where my diaries and letters came in. READ MORE It's a long time, to put it bluntly, since I was 21. If I wanted to accurately capture the feelings of the younger Laura, I needed to remind myself what it felt like to be young and messy and full of big emotions. I needed to remember what it felt like to make stupid romantic choices, to never be honest about my feelings, to have my heart broken. Luckily, I had the perfect means to do just that. [ Anna Carey: 'Today's teenagers are pleasingly similar to my generation' Opens in new window ] When I opened the large cloth-covered notebook that covered the period of my life from 1994 to summer 1997, I thought reading about my college years for the first time in decades might be funny. I knew it would be helpful for the book. I didn't, for one second, predict that it would be so emotionally intense. Back when I wrote my first young adult novels, I had looked at my diaries from my mid-teens and laughed at the melodrama of my little teenage self. That girl from the early 1990s felt like a kid. She felt like another person. But the writer of my college diaries didn't feel like another person. She felt like me. Younger, of course, and much messier and more dramatic, but to my own surprise I didn't feel a massive sense of distance between the person who wrote about her college heartbreaks and the fortysomething reading about them three decades later. And so when I read my way through that notebook and the one that followed, I was reliving the highs and lows of my mid-1990s life. I found myself feeling genuinely angry with people I hadn't thought of in decades, about incidents I had totally forgotten. I found myself emotionally experiencing all of it. My joy and my pain radiated off the page so strongly, it was almost overwhelming, decades later. Anna Carey at Two Pups Cafe in Fairview, Dublin After I told a friend about my weirdly emotional research project, she unearthed the letters I'd written to her back in the day. Then I found the letters she wrote to me, and for weeks we photographed and WhatsApped every page of our 1990s correspondence to each other, both of us weeping with laughter over long-ago misadventures. And it wasn't just letters. In college, to practise her typing, my friend went through a phase of transcribing our conversations on her family computer as we chatted in her house. Miraculously, she found printouts of these transcripts and suddenly there we were, our brilliant, hilarious, stupid young selves, with our in-jokes and personal dramas, talking about gigs and parties and people we forgot about decades ago. It made me laugh until I cried and then suddenly to my surprise I was crying not with laughter, but at the sheer intensity of this contact with my own youth. It's a strange thing, going back in time. And sometimes you realise the story you've told yourself about that period could have been a very different one. Reading my diaries and letters, I could clearly see the narrative I created for myself at the time, one that I internalised and that still affected how I saw my younger days. But decades later, I saw that I could have chosen to tell a very different story. My younger self made decisions that, at the time, I refused to see were decisions. I put up with situations that were making me angry and miserable when I could have just walked away. Early on in college a boy told me he wasn't in love with me any more. At the time it was the most blunt, hurtful thing anyone had ever said to me, one that hung over me for months. Unsurprisingly, I remembered that all too well. But I had no memory of the fact, documented in my diary almost as an aside, that he told me it was because he didn't think I had ever really been in love with him. And looking back, I realised he had been right (on that point, at least). But when I was young and hurting, I didn't see it that way, or I didn't care, because what mattered was that he had rejected me. After writing that detail in my diary I forgot about it. How would the next year of my life have been different if I hadn't forgotten the part I'd played in that relationship's end? If I'd framed the incident as one in which I wasn't totally passive? It made me wonder what stories I'm telling myself about my life now. That's a lot to get from a 31-year-old notebook from Miss Selfridge. [ How I turned my book The Making of Mollie into a play – with a little help from some young innovators Opens in new window ] The French writer Henry de Montherlant famously wrote that 'happiness writes in white ink on a white page' and so it's not surprising that most of my diary entries were full of angst. In summer 1997 I went to Boston and fell in love with an American man (Gen Z might disapprove of age-gap relationships but they have nothing on my generation; my friend unearthed a letter to a mutual pal in which she wrote that 'Anna has two jobs and a Texan lover who's 25 '. Bear in mind I turned 22 towards the end of that summer so this was hardly a problematic gap). I was very, very happy and in a healthy romantic relationship for the first time in my life, and I hardly wrote in my diary all summer, apart from a few breathless lines marvelling over my magical good luck. It was the American boy who set up my first email address for me, and when I tearfully returned to Dublin we corresponded not via letters but emails, all of which vanished into the digital ether long ago. I didn't know it, but that was the beginning of the end for me and letters. My diary writing continued, but it also petered out after I got together with my now-husband back in 2001. My diary thrived on drama, and a happy, settled relationship is not very dramatic. Anna Carey and her husband-to-be Patrick Freyne on stage with their band El Diablo circa 2000. But then, to my surprise, both diary writing and letters returned to my life. About 10 years ago I got a 'one line a day' five-year diary, a dated journal in which you write a single sentence about each day. It wasn't like my old diary, where I poured out my soul, but it was a written record of my day to day life – something I wished I'd done more back in the '90s, instead of spending my summer in Berlin writing very little about my magical experiences in an amazing city at an incredible time in its history but a lot about my stupid boy-related angst. Letters returned in an unexpected form. At the height of lockdown in 2020, the New Yorker magazine writer Rachel Syme started a pen pal exchange, and I signed up. I've been corresponding with my Brooklyn pen pal Erin for five years now; we hit it off from the first letter, and I love that there are now written records of our lives and thoughts and feelings on each side of the Atlantic. When I was writing my new book, I wrote to Erin about its progress, sharing the highs and the lows. It makes me happy knowing that somewhere in Brooklyn is a series of postcards and letters telling the story of how I wrote Our Song. For a book that couldn't have been written without handwritten journals and letters, it feels just right. I think my younger self would approve. Our Song is published by Hachette Ireland. Anna Carey will be talking to Sinéad Moriarty as part of the Dalkey Book Festival on June 14th.
