Road movie and coming-of-age are accepted genres; maybe hiking-through-the-forest deserves equal status. It’s a distinctive US indie type, coloured by the sun-dappled green foliage, flavoured by the unemphatic presence of both beauty and danger. And heading for … what? An escalating series of scary moments, or just a low-key crescendo of epiphanies or emotional confrontations? Middle-class New Yorkers can journey through the wilderness in the movies but, unlike in John Boorman’s 1972 film Deliverance, they may encounter only the inner hillbillies of their own anxiety and discontent.
This excellent film from first-time director India Donaldson is a smart, sympathetic and terrifically acted drama about 17-year-old Sam – an outstanding performance from Lily Collias – who agrees to go on a hiking trip in the Catskill mountains with her gloomy divorced dad Chris (played by James Le Gros) and his buddy Matt (Danny McCarthy), a failed actor who shares his friend’s marital status (divorced), his portly body type, his receding hairline and his habit of exhaustedly cracking wise about the awful way their lives appear to have worked out.
