In India Donaldson’s outstanding debut film, a camping trip goes horribly wrong. Goods isn’t a horror film, but there are still plenty of scares to be found in this astute exploration of the shifting power dynamics between a teenage daughter, her divorced father, and his sad-sack best friend as they backpack through the Catskills.
Their annual hiking trip starts off on the wrong foot when Sam (Collias) and her dad Chris (Le Gros) find that their usual group of four has dwindled to three after washed-up actor Matt (McCarthy) announces that his teenage son, still angry about his parents’ recent split, will boycott the trip this year. Sam doesn’t say it out loud, but her face betrays her displeasure. She didn’t sign up for this particular group, and the “father-child hiking trip” vibe has been seriously downgraded to “two middle-aged divorced guys and the queer daughter of one of them who really doesn’t want to share a room with them and now has to sleep on the floor.”
Goods has that kind of dry humor – familiar to anyone who has ever negotiated as a woman with less than enlightened men or endured endless humiliation just because they had the misfortune of being the youngest person in the room. A wordless exchange between Sam and a saleswoman in a supermarket – two young women who ask and answer the eternal question with a look: “Can you believe these two idiots?” – is priceless. It’s also one of the last points of connection and camaraderie Sam will experience on the trip. On the rare occasions when Chris or Matt remember to ask her a question, they can’t wait to hear her answer.
As they go deeper into the woods, the dynamics shift in ways that are fascinating, then exasperating. In a gripping campfire scene, Donaldson’s camerawork is revelatory. As the two grown men exchange monologues, it’s Sam’s reactions that the camera fixates on. Sam is attentive, sympathetic, even when spoken of in the third person (“I tried not to screw her,” her father says, even as she sits right next to him). By the end of the scene, I suspect most viewers will have developed a genuine anger on Sam’s part. Collias, a relatively new performer, does extraordinary things with her face alone, here and in the crucial, irreversible dialogue between father and daughter. Out of a tight, great cast, it’s Collias’s performance – so attentive and understated that its effects come later, like a delayed-release pill – that gets under your skin. It’s a star-making turn: not just a good one, a Great one.
