FOREST GRUMPS

As new drama Good One’ follows a father and daughter on a fraught hiking trip, Xan Brooks looks at an emerging cinema sub-genre featuring the frustrated descendants of westerns

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There’s nowhere to run to in American films any more. The wide open spaces grow narrower by the day. The once impenetrable forests have been carved up for logging, while the prairies are lost to soybean crops and stripmalls.

As for the mountains, forget it – the hiking trails in the summer are as busy as Grand Central Station. The lone explorer nods an awkward hello to all the other lone explorers and pitches his tent every night in designated campsites. The US is no longer a home where the buffalo roam. And if there’s nowhere to run, it means there’s nowhere to hide.

Good One, the fine first feature from writer-director India Donaldson, paints an exacting portrait of America’s 21st-century wilderness problem as it shadows a trio of hikers on a weekend jaunt through the Catskills.

Donaldson’s film is full of moss and mountains, lakes and stars. But it also contains cars and tourists and phones that trill with incoming messages each time their owners climb a hill and get a signal. Newcomer Lily Collias plays teenage Sam, who comes to regret accompanying her amiable dad (James Le Gros) and his best mate Matt (Danny McCarthy) to the woods.

Dad, we learn, has just weaselled out of a stressful work project, while Matt is in full, ignominious flight from his marriage. At night, by the tent, the men entertain themselves with campfire horror stories about ruinous divorces and reckless adulteries. Judging by the look on Sam’s face, the girl can’t wait to get back to her Brooklyn brownstone.