Dad is dying, unseen, in an adjacent room. His three grown-up daughters are gathered in his apartment for three days, preparing for his death while coping with their buried emotions – towards him, and, with increasing agitation, each other.
Azazel Jacobs’s poignant but unsentimental film, set in a Lower East Side apartment, is painful, messy, sharp-edged, and for anyone who has experienced the weird mix of extreme practicality and unrealised grief that comes with helping a loved one through palliative care, a real heartbreaker.
The New York filmmaker is a past master of intimate family dramas full of sly observations. Films like Terri (2011) and The Lovers (2017) have taken the edge off their stories of domestic woes – kids struggling at school, infidelity, money worries – with smart but goofy wit. His Three Daughters is a slightly graver proposition – terminal illness being tougher to jolly up. Funny but in an awkward, more nakedly emotional way.
It’s built on the performances of its three leads: Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen and Carrie Coon – a trio of actresses whose contrasting strengths dovetail beautifully in that Cries and Whispers-y set-up.
Beautifully acted and with an emphatic spirit, its humanity runs deep
Lyonne is Rachel, a stoner shut-in and sports betting devotee who’s been living with her terminally ill dad. The arrival of her estranged half-sisters, the tight-wound Katie (Coon), struggling with a difficult teen at home, and the softer, more sensitive Christina (Olsen), a newbie mum, immediately throws out the equilibrium in the confined space.
The energy shifts and shifts again like a weather front as Katie quickly wrestles control from Rachel, fixating on do-not-resuscitate forms and barely acknowledging her sister’s efforts to care for their dad or even her emotional stake in it all. The ethereal Christina frets about her baby at home. Retreating into her weed stash, Rachel’s glazed bemusement slowly turns to angst and frustration.
Jacobs doesn’t want you to choose sides, although the film’s strongest scene has Rachel’s boyfriend Benji (Jovan Adepo) speaking major home truths to her two sisters. He never takes us into the dad’s room either, keeping the focus on a thorny sisterly dynamic that finds touching catharsis at the last.
His Three Daughters is a smartly shot but strictly a one-and-a-bit location affair (Rachel occasionally goes outside for a spliff) and it won’t lose too much watched on Netflix at home. But thanks to its stellar cast, it’s never stagey or stiff. Beautifully acted and with an emphatic spirit, its humanity runs deep.
In US theaters Sep 6. Streaming on Netflix Sep 20.