A soft, sentimental portrait of familial grief, His Three Daughters is carried by its stars

Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters opens on Katie (Carrie Coon), who spits out a winded monologue with barely space for breath. Then her two sisters enter, and finally Katie comes up for air, if only for a moment, so that Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) can have her turn depriving the room of oxygen. Christina is Katie’s youngest sister and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) is the middle child, two women with whom Katie could perhaps not feel any less tangible kinship with, a persistent shared adolescent gibberish language notwithstanding. The one thing that ties the three women is the slow, painful decline of their ailing father, Vinnie (Jay O. Sanders), under housebound hospice care at the co-op apartment in Manhattan which rear all of them—albeit at largely different times. Rachel was effectively adopted by Vinnie after he married her mother, following the death of Christina and Katie’s mother. But Rachel’s status as a stepsister and Katie and Christina’s age difference rendered the three of them viewing their childhoods, and their relationships with their father, very differently. These differences, in turn, have guided a strained relationship into adulthood.

His Three Daughters (Jacobs’ follow up to 2020’s enjoyable French Exit) is a sentimental, sweet, and very “actorly” film, and feels more like a stage play despite being written for the screen. The story mostly takes place inside the father’s apartment over the course of several days, as the trio of unalike women attempts to reconcile their differences with the grief that’s currently uniting them, waiting for their father to finally pass. The course of the narrative and the characters’ development are foreseeable and serve in no small part as awards consideration platforms for Coon, Olsen, and Lyonne (although, the latter is largely typecast here). The two uptight mother-sisters who seem to have their lives together versus the pot-smoking sister who spends her days betting on sports games. If I had wanted to bet $1,000 on my initial expectation, something along the lines of “the three women will understand that they have more in common than they realize and will grow to learn from one another’s differences,” I’d be a little bit richer.

The journey to that predictable conclusion, though, is well worth taking, and it’s never a bad experience watching these three talented actresses play off one another; chiefly, Olsen, whose return to her indie roots has been nearly a decade coming. Olsen portrays Christina as an overly overjoyed new mom hiding a psychotic break in her back pocket underneath layers of mindfulness and yoga, a former drug-loving Deadhead who sings their songs to her dying father much to the chagrin of her sisters. Coon’s Katie is domineering, straitlaced, and tightly wound, as she intermittently battles it out on the phone with her teenage daughter who’s just learning how to rebel against her mother’s rules. Then there’s Lyonne as the down-to-earth, streetwise Rachel, a familiar character for the actress if slightly more demure (but no less prickly).

Rachel resents her sisters taking over the apartment in their father’s final days, knowing that they still view her as an interloper to their family—yet she’s been the one solely presiding over his care. Christina has an excuse in living across the country, but Rachel has less sympathy for the Brooklyn-bound Katie. Her infrequent visits have more vocally aggravated Rachel’s boyfriend (Jovan Adepo). This clown car inhabits an apartment that at once feels impossibly, unendingly huge and suffocatingly small—hard to imagine it had previously housed three children and two parents. DP Sam Levy has unsurprising credits on Lady Bird and Frances Ha, films whose naturalistic touch contains shades of expressionism that allow their spaces to hold an aura of warm, comfortable nostalgia that disguises their constant potential for present hostilities.

The tensions between the sisters never quite ramp up into a Marriage Story-esque, Oscar-baity blow-up, which is for the best. His Three Daughters is already a bit too composed of run-on monologues where characters seem to know precisely just what to say to one another. The opening scene in which Katie, Christina, and Rachel gather in a circle to discuss the uncomfortable situation at hand—the camera pointedly alternating between medium close-ups of each sister separately, to emphasize their disconnect—precariously verges on being overwrought, far too insistent upon itself to prove both its screenwriter and its cast. But at the same time, the climax of His Three Daughters could be seen as something of a self-aware jest at the very fantastical, movie-centric idea that people could ever think of exactly what to say to their loved ones in the short time that they have left with them. It’s a perspective given credence by a scene in which Christina relays to her sisters her father’s views on the way death is portrayed in film and on TV. As a child, he had told her that the reality of death is absence; “the rest is just fantasy.”

Jacobs here acknowledges the paradox of the cinematic grieving portrait he wishes to paint. Self-awareness can only take a film so far, however, and it can sometimes feel like Jacobs wants to have his cake and eat it too. But it also strikes as a crucial heel turn in the way both the sisters and the audience are meant to perceive the grieving process. The sisters attempt to decipher the meaning of what their father told Christina, but the absence of what is said between them and about their father is where they learn to find meaning in their relationship. In the end, despite whatever they’ve said, their feelings towards the loss of their father are depicted most plainly in the absence of his body in his favorite reclining chair, a physical space they attempt to fill themselves as if feeling for his ghost in the folds of leather.

It’s a poignant moment, and His Three Daughters is an extremely effective tear-jerker. The emotional monologues towards the film’s conclusion are catnip for those with, as Jack Donaghy might say, “two ears and a heart.” Far less dark and dryly humorous than French Exit, Jacobs’ latest film turns on the melodrama and allows its leading ladies to spread out within the layered confines of their characters, coping with the physical and emotional confines of their situation. The three sisters eventually part without getting in that perfect final word, but still recognize an unspoken understanding that the years, distance, and blood (or lack thereof) which has separated them are also absences that should be used to cherish one another more deeply in the present.

Director: Azazel Jacobs
Writers: Azazel Jacobs
Starring: Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, Rudy Galvan, Jose Febus, Jasmine Bracey, Jay O. Sanders, Jovan Adepo
Release Date: September 6, 2024; September 20, 2024 (Netflix)