His Three Daughters is a gem, a movie that fills you with life even as it confronts death, a movie that reminds you of the prickliness of family and causes you to reflect on your own relationships and the people you’ve lost, and a movie that shows just how much can be done with one location and a few fantastic actors.
Katie, Christina, and Rachel are three women who have gathered in the New York apartment Rachel shares with their father. The man is now in hospice care in his bedroom, and the daughters are doing their best to pass the time and cope. There’s friction between Katie and Rachel, largely because Katie is a high-intensity high achiever and she thinks Rachel is doing nothing with her life. Rachel, for her part, seems perfectly happy making some money betting on sports and otherwise mostly smoking pot, although she’s also been the primary caregiver for their father as he’s declined and Katie has rarely visited. Christina lives far away and appears to be mostly stuck in the middle of things, as she seems the type who just cares about everyone and wants calm and cooperation in this difficult situation.
The movie is impeccably cast, playing to each actor’s strengths, with Carrie Coon delivering rapid-fire dialogue as Katie, Natasha Lyonne simply wanting to do her thing as Rachel, and Elizabeth Olsen displaying her expert ability to express guileless sincerity. And writer-director Azazel Jacobs has written three women who are believable as sisters but who are unquestionably different people—Coon’s dialogue sounds affected, like something we’d hear from a 1990s independent film, Lyonne feels fully lived-in and human, and Olsen is somewhere in between. And Jacobs is smartly restrained about how he uses his camera: most of the shots are static, but he strategically deploys movement when the dynamics shift. It all takes what is really a very small movie and leaves us feeling huge emotions.
His Three Daughters is on Netflix September 20th.
