They are his three daughters, but not all of them by blood. He is Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), and cancer is killing him. Unlikely to last the next few weeks, the daughters have decided to stay at their old family apartment in New York City to oversee his hospice care.
Katie (Carrie Coon), a Brooklynite, is fidgety, high-strung, and needs control in order to function. She talks in run-on sentences and suspects that her teenage daughter is on a personal mission to destroy her mental well-being, on top of the current situation’s stress. Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) is kind, but a little spaced out, and a mother, too, who has left her small family halfway across the country to care for her dad. Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) is something of a layabout, childless and seemingly doing nothing in her spare time except sports betting and smoking pot—but she has lived with Vincent long-term, and was the only daughter overseeing his care before Katie and Christina moved in.
This film is not only about death—its long process of bereavement, its morbid technicalities—and daughterhood, but also about how three daughters, through death, learn to become sisters.
Something wisely deployed in His Three Daughters is its almost coy attitude towards Vincent. For the majority of the film, he is never seen, with the hint of machinery and the continuous beeping of the monitor being the only signs of his presence. He is hidden by the bedroom door never quite opening all the way, the cramped angles of the apartment’s corridors, and other timely edits/positionings of writer-director Azazel Jacobs’s camera.
This is appropriate, because the father cannot be properly dealt with before the daughters have resolved several unspoken (and spoken) tensions borne out of childhood and into adulthood. Like other much sillier, chiller-flick horrors, the impact of the conflict is best conveyed invisibly, as the body dying in the next room, whom the daughters stare at and talk to with varying degrees of concern. How bad is he? Our imagination completes the picture.
This is a very “talky” film. For the majority of the time, the sisters are either talking to (arguing with, really) each other or to one of the few ancillary characters who come in and out of the apartment—namely the hospice workers (Rudy Galvan and Jasmine Bracey), as well as Rachel’s protective boyfriend Benjy (Jovan Adepo). The very first scene is a full-blown paranoid yap-spree from Katie’s bitter mouth, and from then on, the viewer must pick up on all the context clues of the situation with minimal spoon-feeding on Jacobs’s part. It is not until a little over fifteen minutes have passed that the pace slows down, and some aesthetic rest is granted to the viewer.
I was surprised to see that Jacobs had no significant credits in theater before this, for His Three Daughters is very much an emotionally charged chamber piece reminiscent of the long tradition in that medium of such works. Think Chekhov, O’Neill, Williams, etc. The moody family drama we are all well-acquainted with. As far as I know, he has only worked in film (his father is noted experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs); granted, his other projects, which I have not seen, could be in a similar vein as this latest one, but it is nevertheless true that the majority of His Three Daughters could be transplanted to the stage with very little difficulty, since the main action takes place in a single location.
By saying this, I do not mean to make the film come across as one of those visually workaday, made-for-TV adaptations of classic plays, or some staid Merchant-Ivory. True, there are no snazzy visual tricks on display in His Three Daughters, but there is formal attention being paid: Notice how often, in the beginning of the film, the sisters are isolated. Even when two sisters share the same frame, one dominates while the other is occluded—they are bound by familial obligation, and occupy the same living space, but are not living together.
Misunderstandings abound. Habits clash. Katie and Christina’s divergent mothering personas swoop in on Rachel, who has always felt left out of the family dynamic and even more so now that her father (and, more importantly, pal) has wasted away.
But as the film reaches its climax, and the women talk through their differences and begin to understand each other better, they share the screen more and more, and intimacy warms their interactions…
…right up to the end, when something that threatens to fully break the realistic mode His Three Daughters has been operating in occurs. I will not be forthcoming about the development, for I hope the viewer comes to it as unprepared as I was in the hopes for a more genuine evaluation, but suffice it to say that it very nearly is a huge misstep which just about saves itself with a last-second twist. It’s one the viewer will most likely see coming, and likely hope for—without it, the carefully modulated mood of the film (never too heavy, but also not letting its moments of levity clash with the reality of the situation) nosedives into the sort of saccharine territories other, less well-balanced films would indulge in.
Now, it’s still a significant enough shift (in both tone and belief-suspension) to constitute a fracture, if not full breakage, and despite the terrific performance that carries it, one doubts its overall necessity to the story. The whole film is about the daughters, and what they believe or come to believe about their relationships with each other and their dying father—to see certain elements spelled out so explicitly almost insults the viewer who has attentively mapped out the dynamics playing out in front of them.
However, since His Three Daughters’ ambitions are never that high to begin with, even a late-plot turnabout cannot completely tank the film; and, similarly, although there is sometimes a clash between the script and the performers enacting it (I mean a kind of delivery, in certain scenes, that awkwardly exposes the artifice of the dialogue—if you watch it, you might catch it too), the lead trio are all quite commendable.
Coon is top-tier, as per usual, and while I haven’t been always convinced by an Elizabeth Olsen performance, she is good as the somewhat ditzy Deadhead whom no one takes seriously until her emotional maturity is most needed (and when she is most overwhelmed). I haven’t seen Lyonne in much, but in what I have seen, it’s hard to separate her whole hard-talkin’, devil-may-care shtick from a role that needs less of that, and perhaps more cowed vulnerability—but she accomplishes it here, for the most part.
Yes, His Three Daughters has no aspirations towards the echelons of art that revolutionize mediums, and/or push certain formal traditions to their limits, but it is still a very decent film that treats its morose yet all-too-relatable subject matter with the maturity it warrants.
* * *
If you enjoyed this review of Azazel Jacobs’ HIS THREE DAUGHTERS, consider supporting our film on a great American poet and get patron-only content on Patreon. This will help the growth of this site, the automachination YouTube channel, and the ArtiFact Podcast. Our video essays include an investigation into the death of American journalist Paul Klebnikov in Moscow, the role of white guilt in American politics, and a prediction of Donald Trump’s 2024 election. You can also follow us on Twitter.
More from Ezekiel Yu: Remorse, Post Mortem: Reviewing Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence” (2024), A Reflection on Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (2011), With Quick Descent: Reviewing Tarsem Singh’s “The Fall” (2006)