Good Riddance is the story of a 13-year-old girl, Manon (Charlotte Laurier), and her obsessive passion for her mother (Marie Tifo). The two live, along with the mother's brother, in poverty in a remote village in Québec's Laurentian Mountains. Their isolation in this seemingly timeless place makes Manon's fantasy that she and her mother are bound together by an inexorable force not entirely unreasonable. But her need to wall off her mother from the love of anyone else - lover or brother - expresses itself in an increasingly Machiavellian manipulation as Manon's sassy, loving rebellion turns to desperate resolve.
Both Marie Tifo and Charlotte Laurier (who was 11 years old when chosen for the part) received universally rave reviews for their performances in this film which Janet Maslin of the New York Times called “original and unsettling, with an unusual staying power.”