His Three Daughters trailer forces Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon, and Elizabeth Olsen to share their grief

The trailer for His Three Daughters is a character study in shared grief. Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon, and Elizabeth Olsen all star in the new film from Azazel Jacobs, and all three of these semi-estranged sisters are already picking up awards season buzz after rave reviews out of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Debuting in theaters September 6 and premiering on Netflix on September 20, the film captures the chaos, confusion, exhaustion, and beauty of “pre-mourning” a loved one as they’re dying.

His Three Daughters is described as a “bittersweet and often funny story of an elderly patriarch and the three grown daughters who come to be with him in his final days. Katie (Carrie Coon) is a controlling Brooklyn mother dealing with a wayward teenage daughter; free-spirited Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) is a different kind of mom, separated from her offspring for the first time; and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) is a sports-betting stoner who has never left her father’s apartment—much to the chagrin of her half-sisters, who share a different mother and worldview,” per the synopsis from Netflix. “Continuing his astute exploration of family dynamics in close-knit spaces, Jacobs follows the siblings over the course of three volatile days, as death looms, grievances erupt, and love seeps through the cracks of a fractured home.”

The movie was filmed mostly in one small apartment, and the claustrophobia can be felt in the trailer. These sisters clearly have years of misunderstanding and resentments between them, and they’re divided about the best way to handle their father’s remaining days. Being forced into closed proximity brings the tension between them to a boiling point, but it also softens them toward each other, highlighting the heartbreak and humor of letting go of a parent. “Married a couple of crazy bitches, raised a few crazy bitches,” Lyonne suggests as a line for their father’s obituary. 

According to a profile on the film for Vanity Fair, Jacobs wrote the three siblings with the actors in mind, and the script plays with the archetypes we’ve come to associate with each performer. Lyonne, for instance, notes that there’s no “surprise” in her playing a pothead, but His Three Daughters reveals an unforeseen depth and vulnerability to the character. “Natasha is right in that you kind of read those things and you think, Oh, these are all types. And then as the script unfolds, what you understand is that the form follows the function—the story unfolds in such a way that the audience first encounters the sisters as they’re seeing each other,” Coon explains. “And then as their point of view gets complicated, so does the audience’s. The audience is actually going on the same journey as the sisters are going on, as they’re rediscovering each other inside of that grief.”