HIS THREE DAUGHTERS - Mark Reviews Movies

His Three Daughters, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 19, 2024

Life has physically and/or emotionally separated three sisters, but in His Three Daughters, the imminent death of their father brings or, as it may seem, forces them together. Writer/director Azazel Jacobs' film is an exceptional study of these characters and their frayed relationships, strained for assorted reasons before all of them have to keep watch over their dying father. Essentially stuck in the apartment where they grew up and with the specters of death and regrets and old pains hanging heavy in this space, things become worse quickly.

Jacobs' screenplay is particularly noteworthy for how much it communicates about these people and their bonds in such short order. Take the very first scene of the film, which immediately lets us know who Katie (Carrie Coon), the eldest of the sisters, is and how she behaves under this kind of pressure. She's basically instructing the middle sister—whose connection to the other two, by the way, is intrinsically tenuous for reasons that become apparent soon enough—how this entire process will go, what still needs to be done, and how the three siblings will act during it.

The target of Katie's orders is Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), the middle sister, and in this same scene, Jacobs isn't just telling us about Katie by way of her deluge of directions, as well as some passive-aggressive scolding. After all, the sisters' father, isolated in his bedroom in the New York City apartment under at-home hospice care, insisted on a do-not-resuscitate order.

Since Rachel was with him before hospice care became necessary, she had the responsibility, in Katie's mind, to ensure that a physician signed off on that legal and medical request. Now, it might be too late, because the father is bedridden, is slipping in and out of consciousness, and might not be able to communicate with a doctor, if they can even find one for a home visit.

Through all of this, Rachel simply sits there. She sits in a chair, looking at or away from her older sister, and simply takes it. She takes the not-so-subtle accusations that she's lazy or irresponsible or failing a dying man or all of this and much more. In a film that depends so much on lengthy dialogue between these characters and monologues when someone has to make a point or what amount to soliloquies while they're alone on the phone with an absent party, the silences mean just as much, too.

Jacobs' uses a lot of close-ups here (If the majority of the shots aren't close-ups or tightly framed medium shots of the actors, it certainly feels that way). The silence tells us what we need to know about Rachel, who doesn't have much of anything to say in retort to Katie or, compared to the other two sisters, for the rest of the story, for that matter. The focus on Lyonne's face in this scene allows us to read the character within that silence—the hints of guilt, yes, but also the irritation that Katie, who lives in a neighboring borough but hasn't visited their father much, is placing the whole of the blame on her.

Finally, there's the third sister. She's Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), the youngest who has come from another part of the country, who walks into the living/dining room as her older sisters are in the middle of this tense scene. Things brighten momentarily, because Christina has that way about her—smiling through everything, looking for the positive side of the worst situations, playing peacemaker as needed but not always wanted.

In just one scene, Jacobs lays out the stakes of the drama, the fundamentals of these characters, and the simmering conflicts that will boil over time and again as the three sisters navigate this contradictory task. It doesn't require much from them, because their father's cancer and his deteriorating body will run their course, but it also requires everything in terms of being there for him, as well as actually letting go of him in a very real way, and, somehow, each other.

It may feature only three main characters, as well as a few featured players whose occasional presence becomes part of the routine, and be set primarily in a single location, but the film is rich in details, ideas, and, yes, drama. At the forefront are these three women, played with conviction and, considering just how much the script seems to tell us from the start, unexpected subtlety by Coon, Lyonne, and Olsen. There's a sense, not only that these women know who they are, but also—and more potently as additional information emerges and the conflict among them expands—that they don't quite understand each other or how they're perceived.

Much of this conflict results in tension, as Katie's resentment of and irritation about Rachel mounts—often for reasons she has to look for, such as old apples in the fridge or that Rachel won't sit in watch over their father. Rachel knows she can't win with her older sister, no matter what she does or says, and there's a lot of old baggage among them—most of it having to do with the fact that Katie and Christina's father isn't technically Rachel's biological father. She can feel that distance, because she always has felt it, apparently, but Katie and Christina are so caught up in their grief, lives, and specific bond as siblings that they don't seem to notice what Rachel is feeling.

Again, those are the basics of the human drama at play here, and it's complex, thoughtful, and focused on an equal degree of sympathy for all three sisters. That alone, combined with Jacobs' deceptively simple form (His editing uses some jarring cuts to emphasize the friction and how much is left hanging after a particularly difficult interaction) and the skill of the central performances, makes this a thoroughly compelling examination of encroaching grief, three specifically developed characters, and the intricacies of how these assorted relationships are fraught and how they might—or might not—be healed.

It is also about dying and death, of course, in ways that are frank—thanks to the regular presence of hospice facilitator Angel (Rudy Galvan), who speaks about the practical and hints at the pragmatic elements of allowing someone to die—and free of any false hope or phony sentimentalization. Jacobs lets Christina address that philosophy, as she recalls her and the father watching a movie about death decades ago, only for him to be quite upset about how much it got wrong. It's the absence, the sisters' old man concluded, that defines death.

As an apparent rule, then, the father in His Three Daughters remains unseen and unheard, almost out of respect for the character and those private moments with his daughters. When Jacobs does break that rule, it is with good reason, resulting in a haunting scene of just how much can be left unrevealed, unspoken, and unresolved in life. In a film that feels so steeped in reality, that moment is as real as it gets.

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