At the start of Azazel Jacobs’s new film His Three Daughters (on Netflix now), one worries about what’s to come. The dialogue is delivered in stilted fashion, the camera close and static. It all feels like a dubious adaptation of a stage play, stiff and presentational. The film’s stars, Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen, are all welcome screen presences, and yet it seems it would have been preferable to see them do this material on an intimate stage downtown.
Soon enough, though, Jacobs’s film relaxes, begins to breathe at a lulling rhythm. The reality is still somewhat heightened—do people in real life talk quite this expositionally, in monologue form?—but that slight artifice engages rather than alienates. His Three Daughters gradually blooms into one of the most stirring dramas of the year, a sad little family story that concerns a vast universal human experience.
Coon, Lyonne, and Olsen play the titular daughters of a dying man, unseen for most of the film, as they wait for him to slip away in his cozy-cramped Manhattan apartment. They, too, are worried about what’s to come, though they know it is inevitable and imminent. Coon is Katie, a brittle Type-A who lives across the river in Brooklyn but has not been terribly present during her father’s illness. This frustrates her ne’er-do-better-than-okay stepsister, Rachel (Lyonne), who still lives with their father and has been with him through every agonizing step of his decline. Katie is judgmental of Rachel’s habits (smoking weed in the house, gambling on sports), and the two seem spoiling for a fight.
Attempting to calm the house is youngest sister Christina (Olsen), who lives far away on the west coast in contented early mommydom. She’s a former Deadhead free-spirit who has settled into more basic, traditional routine; she balances the woo-woo with the practical, though something rebellious and hungry still glows in her eyes.
Each character is carefully and precisely drawn, carried past archetype into the wonderful, scratchy detail of real personhood. They credibly register as a family half-estranged from one another, now struggling to hold together as they face the same impending grief. The pleasure of the film is simply watching them negotiate and bicker, revealing ever more facets of their personal histories as Jacobs calmly observes.
The trio is occasionally interrupted by a palliative care nurse, or by Rachel’s sorta boyfriend, Benjy, played with quiet warmth by Jovan Adepo. But mostly it is just them, grappling with what it means to close a huge family chapter, unsure of what a new one might look like—if one will exist at all.
Rachel feels she is the outsider, as the dying man, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), is not her biological father. But in all other senses he is very much her dad; she’s closer to him than either of his “real” children are. That tension could be leveraged for cheap and obvious drama. Jacobs, though, approaches the topic head-on while finding shading in the approach; we get the sense that a conversation is finally being held out in the open after years of unspoken resentment. It’s startling and sorrowful and cathartic at once.
In this scene, and throughout the film, Coon, Lyonne, and Olsen are superb, rounding Jacobs’s more formal stretches of dialogue with the stutter and tic of everyday speech. The flashiest role, if you can call it that, is probably Lyonne’s—she is the ragged heart of the film, tempering her usual pepperiness with dashes of weary melancholy. Coon, meanwhile, convincingly plays a woman masking her insecurities with tense haughtiness.
On second viewing, though, I found Olsen’s to be the most affecting performance. She delicately paints a portrait of a person clinging to the soothing but insufficient balm of positive thinking. There are moments when one wonders if she might actually be the saddest of the three—but maybe the wisest, too. A scene in which Christina explains what being a Deadhead really was all about is not just a compelling excavation of a character, but maybe of a whole culture.
In that scene and many others, the power lies in specificity, the ways in which Jacobs draws us into an understanding of this small and particular huddle of people. We ache for them as individuals, but then, too, for ourselves, for our fears and losses and senses of helplessness as time gradually reclaims all it has given us.
Jacobs’s film is mostly spare and unadorned. Toward its end, though, he allows for one fanciful reverie, in which a final moment of connection and exchange is imagined. Jacobs halts mid-sentiment, evoking the curt endings of pretty much all lives. There is so much we will never know about the people we love. His Three Daughters insists with a bleary sigh that to have known them at all will have to be enough.
