His Three Daughters

The bully. The peacemaker. The disappointment. That’s the first impression of “his” three daughters. Dad’s slowly dying in his bedroom, but the camera never goes in there. Instead, we form our opinions of his adult children as they move around the remaining rooms of his New York apartment, readying for his death and trying not to rip each other’s heads off in the process.

Carrie Coon plays eldest Katie, withering in her judgment of her sisters, the hospice workers, her teenage daughter (who only exists off-camera, the target of Katie’s cellphone seething). Elizabeth Olsen is Christine, the baby of the family and a new mom herself, flown in from the West Coast and trying to cling to some shred of Zen. And Natasha Lyonne is middle child Rachel, a sports-betting stoner who stayed close and cared for their father in his last years. Katie pays lip service to this being Rachel’s home now, but that doesn’t stop her from resuming her natural position as the family’s alpha, declaring the apartment a no-weed zone and sending Rachel to smoke pot outdoors in frigid winter. Rachel’s trips downstairs supply the only breath of fresh air; otherwise, His Three Daughters is close to suffocating in its dead-on depiction of a fucked-up family trying but mostly failing at unfucking itself.

Indie filmmaker Azazel Jacobs (The Lovers, Terri) has assembled so many tender spots – sibling estrangement, dead moms, dying dads, the sad drudgery of hospice care, the messed-up family dynamics we reproduce in successive generations – that you might reasonably wrap the entire film in a trigger warning for anyone who’s ever had a family, full-stop. But it – his deft script, their aching performances – is absolutely worth the trauma watch.

Lyonne’s Rachel emerges as the film’s focal point: the one who is most misjudged by her family, and the one most wrecked by the impending loss of their father. With her Muppety voice and native New Yorker’s case that geography is as determinant as genetics, Lyonne’s presence is outsized but her performance is exquisitely controlled; there’s real sleight-of-hand magic in her transition from punchline to a fully fleshed-out person. Disappointingly, Coon – victim to a light “villain edit” – doesn’t get enough good material for a similar reveal of Katie’s depths, the only sour note in an otherwise generous picture. Or maybe that’s just Jacobs being honest. Sometimes your family sucks. And sometimes there’s a lot more going on with them than you think. You’ll never know unless you start talking – a point, even a call to action, Jacobs eloquently makes in the film’s final minutes.