Katie Says Goodbye

Katie is seventeen, lives in a desert town in the American southwest and waits tables in a diner. She and her mother share a trailer and there is no money. Katie's plan is to get to San Francisco and train as a hairdresser; she is saving for it, and the way she saves is by sleeping with men from the town. She treats it as work rather than shame and goes on being kind to everyone. Wayne Roberts writes and directs in his first film. Olivia Cooke plays Katie, with Mireille Enos as her mother, and Christopher Abbott, Jim Belushi and Mary Steenburgen alongside. The idea at the centre of the character is kindness. Katie is angry with nobody and blames nobody, and the film treats that kindness not as a virtue but as an exposure; it is exactly why the town can crush her. It went to festivals in 2016 and opened in the United States in 2019. Critics divided: Cooke's performance was widely admired, while the story's steady dragging of its female character downward was sharply attacked. The image is warm and soft. The desert town is never made ugly, and that is a contrast built on purpose against what happens in it. Who it is for: viewers who like hard American independent drama and who follow Olivia Cooke. Who it is not for: the narrative does bad things to its lead systematically and offers neither a way out nor a comment in return.