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If His Three Daughters plays like filmed theatre, despite being written and directed for the screen by Azazel Jacobs, it’s because grief too often feels like performance. Katie (Carrie Coon), Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) are told every morning by their father’s hospice carer, Angel (Rudy Galvan), that this will likely be his last day alive. They’ve prepared to grieve so much, and grieved the preparation, that a sickly kind of boredom has set in.
Day by day, the hallways in their father’s apartment seem a little narrower, the ceilings a little lower. The film is a chamber drama that rarely steps out into the sun, populated by women who fit together like a pie chart of opposing personality types. Yet, Jacobs delicately toys with the boundaries between truth and artifice, between dishonesty and vulnerability. Our intimacy with these characters is earned by their own efforts to shed their steel-built defences. And it’s all the more rewarding for it.
Rachel, at first, is the most likeable of the trio. She has Lyonne’s fire-red curls and vinyl-scratch vocals, and fires herself like an arrow through every social situation. If she sees bulls***, she calls bulls***. But it’s always disarming when Lyonne’s eyebrows curl up, and those giant eyes widen a little, as if she’d just been electrocuted with sadness – it was key, too, to her Emmy-nominated performance in Netflix’s time loop series, Russian Doll.
Her step-sisters – Rachel isn’t related by blood, but this is the only father she’s ever known – have turned up to their father’s apartment, where she’s been living and taking care of him, and declared it their new territory. Katie complains about her weed habit. She makes speeches that sound flat and oddly rehearsed, her arms democratically crossed like a therapist. Christina’s singsong voice speaks almost exclusively about her daughter, at home a few thousand miles across the country. She’s given herself the role of peacemaker, but performs it with the smallest touch of passive aggression, as Olsen brings her hand up to her chest like an affronted medieval maiden.
His Three Daughters is the kind of family drama you spend waiting, nervously, for the unspoken sentence between its characters to finally explode onto the scene. By the time we get there, Coon’s hard edges haven’t fully softened, but they’ve been given form and structure. She’s shown us the bars of the cage she never wanted to climb into. Christina, meanwhile, has finally divulged her exasperation that her emotionality is never read as sincere. All three women live in roles they’re not particularly invested in playing, yet they’re played by actors who have breathed all their body and soul into them.
And, while the endpoint of the women’s conflict seems inevitable, Jacobs remains aware that perfect resolutions rarely exist in the face of death. Christina recalls how their father would argue that the movies could never accurately depict grief. When he does finally appear, in a single scene where he’s played by Jay O Sanders, Jacobs finds the most unexpectedly moving way to respond to his complaint. Maybe the movies will never get it quite right, but His Three Daughters is as honest about grief as one can be.
Dir: Azazel Jacobs. Starring: Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, Rudy Galvan, Jose Febus, Jasmine Bracey, Jay O Sanders, Jovan Adepo. 15, 101 mins.
‘His Three Daughters’ streams on Netflix from 20 September
