‘His Three Daughters’ will make you cry as it heals frayed sibling ties
4/5 tissues will be used up getting through this one!
If you’ve ever lost a loved one to a slow disease, or had to be a caregiver to one, Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters on Netflix, starring Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen, has the power to both heal you and break you.
As their father lays dying in hospice care at home, three sisters are reunited in their family home in New York City, trying to set their father’s affairs in order, and be there for him in what they’re repeatedly told are his final days.
At first glance, His Three Daughters doesn’t feel too novel a premise. But appearances, in this case, are deceptive, and any assumptions you make about where this film is going to go are met with surprise. The more time you spend with these characters, you begin piecing together their stories, like an outsider in a hospital waiting room eavesdropping on a family tragedy.
The film begins with Carrie Coon’s Katie ranting about how the three of them, despite their differences, need to come together, and be there for their father. She’s also reprimanding her sister for not getting the Do Not Resuscitate form signed.
Her authoritative and exasperated tone makes it obvious that she is the elder daughter of the family, taking charge and “being an adult.” She’s directing her breathless monologue at Natasha Lyonne’s red-headed Rachel, who seems utterly lost, and you kinda suspect that she is the rebel child, the black sheep, the younger sibling.
And finally, Elizabeth Olsen’s Christina walks in, graceful and elegant, talking like she is a fair maiden with delicate sensibilities from a different era, repeatedly touching her hand to her chest when emotional as if the slightest of things shock her dainty composure.
At this point, you almost assume that Christina is the middle child. But the film surprises you with a whole different status quo a few scenes later—Christina is the youngest. The dying man is Katie and Christina’s father, who married Rachel’s mother when his first wife passed away, and raised Rachel as his own daughter. But while his biological daughters have been living away with their own families, it is Rachel who has been taking care of him.
His Three Daughters is a poignant story about losing a parent and death, of course, but also about the guilt that parents carry about not talking to their children openly, that children carry for not doing enough for their aging parents, and the delicate sibling bonds that get tested when the biggest link that connects them—parents—ceases to exist.
From passive-aggressive discussions about family property to possessiveness over a parent to needing a sisterly bond at a certain point in life where loneliness sets in, the forced proximity leaves all wounds exposed and the three sisters have no choice but to air out all their grievances and true feelings. If you have siblings, the film will have you questioning just how different your lives have been in the same house. And if it weren’t for the bonds of family, would you even like each other as people? And what if you were different yet kindred, but your relationship was broken, and you wanted to mend it?
It’s interesting that when the film began, my conditioning made me try to find myself in the eldest daughter Katie (because I’ve been known to mother my sibling), and a little in Rachel. too. But the truth is, you’ll find a little bit of yourself in each of the three siblings.
Watching the film was like peeling an onion, and not just because it made me silently sob in my pillow. The film slowly releases its catharsis and always leaves you guessing what is going to happen next. I mean, sure, the father would die and the daughters would reconcile and heal their differences somehow. But it’s not a straight road with quite a few surprises on the way.
The film’s ending is easily the best thing about it, because it’s a total curveball answer to the question of how do you end this film without making it like the many other films about a similar subject. In an earlier scene, when the three sisters are preemptively working on their father’s obituary and reminiscing about their time with him, Christina talks about how he passionately felt that “… books, movies, and everything that tried to show death got it wrong, that the act itself of putting it into images, into words, is where it all went wrong.” And that the only way to put someone’s life into perspective and “to communicate how their death truly feels is through absence.”
And yet, Azazel Jacobs manages to write a climax that both contradicts and supports the above statement, because the death hurts, but the absence of what that life could’ve been hurts more. This is where the film breaks you and heals you, and my advice would be to keep a box of tissues handy for this moving scene, and let Elizabeth Olsen’s soothing voice rock you to calm.
His Three Daughters is elevated by the strong performances from Lyonne, Coon, and Olsen, who seem so perfectly cast in their respective roles. With its bare but effective simplicity that never tilts into sappy or melodramatic, the film relies heavily on these actresses to temper the tone and make you feel for their characters that are not always easy to feel for.
This is a dialogue-heavy film, and Coon and Olsen shoulder this responsibility incredibly well, but it is Lyonne’s bruising silences that are the highlight for me. Her Rachel, who is simply trying to not feel all that she’s feeling, easily took me back to the inexplicable appeal of her Nadia from Russian Doll. And when she finally spoke up for herself, it was a great cathartic release to watch her receive that acknowledgment from her family.
The film’s supporting cast brings out some of the sweeter and lighter moments that are just the break you need from the family drama. The entire film is shot in this one house that’s tightly packed, with only a few scenes of the outside. There’s a theatre-performance like quality to the scenes, where the pauses and silences linger and speak louder than words.
For most of the film, you’ll barely ever see the characters in one frame because they’re so isolated. And the camera takes turns to focus on them. It is only much later, when their relationships begin healing, when they start seeing each other’s perspective that we see them in one frame.
The thing about grief is that there’s never going to be enough written or made to tell you exactly how you’re supposed to cope with it, what you’re supposed to do in those moments when grief hasn’t fully sunk in but is anticipatory, and what you’re supposed to do with all the guilt that you feel. And so, despite many other films made on this subject, the insightfully written and brilliantly performed His Three Daughters by Azazel Jacobs offers you a warm, understanding hug, and a different perspective with which to look at it.
His Three Daughters premiered a year ago at the Toronto International Film Festival and had a limited theatrical release before streaming on Netflix from September 20, 2024.
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