India Donaldsons Goods begins as you’d expect from a Sundance debut: images of crystal-clear streams and millipedes crawling along moss-covered trees as the sound of running water blends with the tinkle of a guitar note. But like its protagonist, a polite and thoughtful teenager named Sam (Lily Collias), there are angry undercurrents beneath the film’s surface, and you ignore them and them at your peril.

Sam, a recent high school grad, is packing for a weekend camping trip with her father, Chris (James Le Gros), and shows a friend her filtered water bottle and the tool she uses to bury her excrement, both of which are meant to make the trip into the wilderness a little more pleasant and sanitary. They’re supposed to team up with her father’s buddy Matt (Danny McCarthy) and his son, but when father and son walk out the door of their brownstone, they’re in the middle of yelling at each other, and Matt gets in the car alone. Everything is out of balance from the start.

Matt, an actor who works less than he used to, is in the midst of a divorce from his son’s mother and is at a point in midlife where things he thought were settled are no longer so certain. Chris went through this himself several years ago and so sympathizes with his friend, but he’s also decided that the best way to get Matt out of his depression is to constantly get on his nerves, and that playful taunts sometimes take a sharper form. He and Sam have gone hiking many times, so often that she’s developed a taste for dried peanut butter, but Matt is an awkward newbie, clueless enough to stuff his overloaded backpack with an electric razor and a copy of Shogun. Chris doesn’t bother to hide his anger, and when Matt takes a snack into his tent for the night, Chris freaks out. Food attracts bears, and while Matt is free to take whatever stupid risks he wants, endangering Chris’ daughter crosses a clear line.

Sam watches it all with dispassionate detachment, joining in when it’s appropriate and persevering when it’s not. When the fathers argue over snacks at a rest stop, the cashier gives Sam a sympathetic look, but once they’re in the woods, she’s on her own. But even as the men fill the air with a stream of nonstop conversation – at one point they pool their resources to memorize the days of the week in Spanish – Donaldson keeps her camera trained on Collias’ deeply expressive face, taking it all in quietly. “How are you so way?” Matt asks after she makes an insightful comment. If you’ve been watching her as closely as she’s watching them, you already know the answer.

Sam’s maturity comes through often, either explicitly or indirectly. She may not be able to drive, but she knows how to behave and when to throw a quick verbal jab to prove she can dish out as much as she can take it. She’s an equal when her father needs someone to share the load with him, a child when he demands that she obey unquestioningly just because he said so. To Matt, she’s a girl who, unlike his own son, isn’t currently angry with him, and also a woman who listens and understands. The lines aren’t crossed, but they blur, especially as Matt sinks deeper into self-pity and neediness as the drive progresses, becoming more desperate for validation that he still has something someone wants. And he expects her to prove it to him, in a way that’s more careless and threatening than a stray bag of chips.

Some viewers will see this coming sooner than others, but Donaldson makes sure none of them miss the moment or mistake Matt’s suggestion for a mere verbal slip. For a first-time screenwriter and director, she’s astonishingly precise in the way she depicts the nuances of seemingly casual conversation and scrutinizes microaggressions. She captures the performative, sometimes aggressive glee of paternal teasing and the way Sam slips in and out of it; the moments when her father drops the acting and expresses genuine tenderness, to her satisfaction and slight discomfort, and the moments when he lets her down in ways big and small. You’re aware of every time she speaks but isn’t heard, or when she keeps her mouth shut because there’s no point in saying anything. And you enjoy the parts where she hits back, reminding Matt that his divorce isn’t something that’s happening to him, it’s something he caused, and that he needs to accept his son’s anger instead of treating it as a problem that needs to be solved.

Goods is a quiet film, not because it has little to say, but because it wants you to listen, to pay as much attention to what is unsaid as to the carefully crafted dialogue, and because silence can be both a power and a punishment. Children see their parents more clearly than they realize, even if they choose to keep these insights to themselves. himself.