Three current films — Good One , It Ends With Us, and Daughters — find new things to say about how girls and young women process their relationship with their fathers. In the near-perfect new Kiwi-linked film, Good One , a teenage girl named Sam faces a literal choice of “man or bear” when her weekend camping trip goes awry. The two men she’s travelling with have both betrayed her in subtle but significant ways.
Now she needs to decide whether to continue traipsing through the Catskills in New York state with them or to hike back to the car by herself through woods we’ve already been informed contain dangerous predators. Man or bear, in case you missed this pervasive thought experiment when it made the rounds earlier this year, is the idea that many women, given the choice between encountering a man while alone in a forest or encountering a bear, would pick the animal. It might be deadly, after all, but at least it doesn’t pretend otherwise.
The only thing that complicates Sam’s personal choice is the fact that one of the men she wants to escape is Chris, her beloved father..
