Good Time · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man wheels a sedated, bandaged body out of a hospital under fluorescent light, certain it's his brother. It isn't. And the astonishing thing about Connie Nikas in that moment is that the mistake doesn't slow him down. He takes in the wrong face and keeps going. Hold onto that image, because Good Time is built out of it: a man whose hands are always a half-step ahead of his understanding.

One housekeeping note first. The credit here reads Benny Safdie; the film was co-directed with his brother Josh, and the fact of brothers making a film about brothers is not incidental to it.

The obvious thing to say is that this is a hundred minutes of pure action. Gilles Deleuze had a name for the cinema built that way — the movement-image, where a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the action resolves the situation. Sheriff sees outlaw, draws, town is saved. Deleuze called the link between seeing and doing sensory-motor, and it's the engine of most crime pictures. Good Time runs it at redline. But look at what Connie's actions actually accomplish. Not one resolves anything. Each one opens a new hole.

So the useful concept isn't the action-image at all. It's a stranger category almost nobody reaches for: the impulse-image. Deleuze put it between feeling and acting, and what lives there isn't a plan. It's an appetite. He called this cinema naturalism and gave it to Stroheim, Buñuel, Losey — filmmakers whose characters don't pursue goals so much as tear pieces out of the world. Connie has no scheme. He has a hunger, dressed as devotion, and it eats whoever is nearest.

Deleuze says naturalist worlds have two floors. The derived milieu is the actual, dateable, sociologically specific place: a hospital corridor, a bail bondsman's office, a suburban house where a teenage girl lives with her grandmother. The Safdies shot all of it real and unglamorous. Underneath sits the originary world — the same place seen as savage terrain, where the only available relations are predation and exhaustion. Adventureland after hours makes that second floor literal. An amusement park emptied of amusement, lit in blacklight and neon, is a funhouse reverted to a cave.

Naturalism also has a built-in gradient, what Deleuze calls the line of slope: an irreversible descent toward entropy. The screenplay's structure is exactly this. One botched decision generates the next, and nothing in the film ever goes back up.

If appetite is the content, the small form is the shape. Deleuze splits the action-image in two. In the large form, a vast situation presses on a man until a decisive act transforms it — the western, the epic. In the small form, it runs backward: an act comes first, and the act discloses a situation you didn't know you were standing in. Good Time is small-form all the way down, and the hospital is its purest instance. Connie performs an extraction; the extraction reveals the world. Wrong man. New debts. Another stranger's night destroyed. Deleuze even has a name for that precise figure — the index of equivocity, an act that could belong to two completely different situations, and which the characters read wrong. The whole film is a chain of them. That's why it can't be spoiled by summary: the pleasure isn't finding out what happens, it's watching a situation assemble itself behind a man who's already three rooms away.

The route is a broken line — bank, apartment, hospital, suburban house, amusement park. Deleuze calls that zig-zag the line of the universe, a trajectory stitching spaces that share nothing except the body passing through them.

Sean Price Williams shot it on 35mm with long lenses, and the choice is the film's signature. Faces fill the frame; behind them the city smears into unreadable colored light. Deleuze's affection-image is usually a pause — a feeling registered on a face, not yet discharged into action. Here's the Safdies' real invention: they fused the affection-image with maximum velocity. Enormous face, illegible world, no establishing shot to tell you where anyone is. That denial of orientation isn't just style. It's a moral instrument. Not knowing where you are is what it feels like to be Connie, and it's also what it feels like to be someone Connie is lying to. The color completes it — reds, acid greens, electric blues that stop functioning as lighting and become the feeling outright, a colour-image absorbing the scene whole.

Then there's Daniel Lopatin's score, which may be the most radical thing in the film. Wall to wall, abrasive, arpeggios and drones welded so tightly to the sound design that you often can't say which is which. Conventional underscore serves the sensory-motor circuit; it tells you when to brace and when to breathe. This doesn't cue anything. It presses. That's a quality-power in Deleuze's sense: an intensity presented for its own sake rather than as anyone's emotion. The debts are audible — Tangerine Dream draped over rain-slick neon in Thief, Carpenter's minimal pulse in Assault on Precinct 13. What the Safdies added was refusal of release. The pressure never lifts for two hours.

The technique itself is documentary technique. Location shooting, non-professionals alongside Pattinson, a handheld camera reacting instead of composing, Ronald Bronstein and Benny Safdie cutting for momentum over clarity — this is the deglamorized New York of The Panic in Needle Park, the street-level chase of Mean Streets, Cassavetes's willingness in A Woman Under the Influence to let performance override plot. And Dog Day Afternoon is the structural ancestor: a small robbery mutating through logistical failure rather than plot twist, held in something near real time. Here's the twist worth arguing. Bazin defended realist technique because it preserved the ambiguity of the real and left the viewer free to look around inside the shot. The Safdies use the identical tools to abolish ambiguity — to pin you inside one man's panic where there's nothing to look at but what he needs next. Vérité as a pressure system.

And then the film stops. It opened on Nick in a therapy session, before the robbery blew that room apart; it closes by returning him to an institutional setting and simply holding there while Iggy Pop sings over Lopatin's music. Nothing to chase. Nothing to do. What's left is watching a body in a room, which is exactly what Deleuze means by a pure optical situation: action withdrawn, seeing all that remains, time suddenly felt as itself rather than as the measure of movement. Benny Safdie plays it without a single performed emotion. He holds a posture and lets duration do the work — a cinema of the body, arriving after two hours in which bodies were only instruments. The structure is the argument. Everything Connie did got buried under adrenaline, and the film's last act is to remove the adrenaline and show you who paid for it.

That's what Good Time did to the crime film. It proved the scruffy street method could carry a genre engine at full throttle without going slick, it made a modest specialty release into the calling card that produced Uncut Gems, and it demonstrated that a franchise-sized star would hand himself over completely to a method this uncomfortable. It also solved something older filmmakers kept circling: how to make a thriller in which you are complicit rather than merely thrilled.

The question to carry into a rewatch is not whether Connie is bad. It's when you started wanting him to get away with it. Watch the ends of scenes. The cutting leaves before the damage lands, so the damage is always behind you, in a room you've already been dragged out of. Watch the faces of the people he leaves there.