For better and for worse, the pandemic begat a certain micro-genre of intimate drama, one defined by its smallness – tight cast, single location, no extras, minimal costumes. His Three Daughters, the latest from the film-maker Azazel Jacobs, feels like a Covid movie. The action is confined to one Manhattan apartment, to which three sisters, played by Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen, return to settle the affairs of their dying father (Jay O Sanders) and say goodbye. The sisters almost entirely pick at the film’s knot of grief, resentment, relief and tricky love; their relationships are, for reasons that trickle out over several days, fraught and frosty. The ensemble players include two hospice nurses, one sister’s hookup and a neighbor.
Not that this is a bad thing; death, especially of the slow and managed kind, is claustrophobic. Jacobs gamely captures the out-of-time emotional shearing and bizarre mundanity of palliative care, how the walls, memories, hours warp and metastasize around waiting for the inevitable. Characters regress, recollections diverge, old wounds fester. After 101 minutes, you will know the floor plan to this apartment, its weathered furniture and dens of privacy, like a familiar cocoon.
