His Three Daughters Is a Lived-In Tale of Sisterhood, Grief, and Grace

Death can both tear family members apart and bind them closer—often simultaneously. That’s the mysterious dynamic writer-director Azazel Jacobs mines in His Three Daughters, a story of three mismatched sisters who gather in their childhood home, a modest, rent-controlled Manhattan apartment, to usher their dying father into the whatever-it-is-that-comes-next. The eldest, bossy, uptight Katie (Carrie Coon), feels the need to steer the ship, as everyone else seems incapable; she’s particularly obsessed with a “Do not resuscitate” form that her father was supposed to have signed when he was still cogent. Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) has left her family, thousands of miles away, to join her sisters in this emotionally rattling endeavor. A onetime Deadhead and yoga nut, she seems to be the calmest of the lot, though her quietude barely masks her annoying self-absorption.

Then there’s Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), who has been living in the apartment and caring for her father—though not well enough, according to Katie. (It was Rachel, naturally, who was supposed to facilitate the signing of that DNR form.) With their conventional thinking and ingrained momlike ways, Katie and Christina have invaded Rachel’s space and cramped her style. Katie harangues her for waking-and-baking and looks askance at her sports betting. It doesn’t help that Rachel isn’t related by blood: Katie and Christina lost their mother when they were young, and their father remarried, accepting his new wife’s daughter as his own. These are three women connected by one man, a father who has loved each disparate personality equally. That’s a bond much thicker than blood, though these women haven’t yet figured that out.

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The great and terrible thing about the death of a family member is that all survivors learn something new about themselves. Jacobs (director of movies like French Exit and Momma’s Man) gives these three crackling, perceptive actors plenty to work with and then steps back to capture their workaday magic. There’s nothing flashy about His Three Daughters; it has a lived-in feel, as if taking its cues from the apartment’s central feature, the smooshy recliner that still bears the warm, invisible butt print of the family patriarch. (Played by Jay O. Sanders, he makes a late appearance that helps tie the movie’s more elusive ideas into a tender wildflower bouquet.) Coon helps us see that if Katie stops nagging, she’ll have to confront her real feelings, and who wants to do that? Olsen vests Christina with the winsome energy of a hummingbird—vibrating with all her might is what holds her together. And Lyonne adds some smudgy shading to the stock role of the eye-rolling stoner wisecracker; she learns that gliding over her feelings isn’t the same as living through them.

There are whispers of Chekhov and Shakespeare in His Three Daughters; both of those writers knew a thing or two about the fractiousness, and the durability, of sisterly connections. But the best thing about His Three Daughters is the ending. Peaceful but in no way resolute, it offers each of its characters a graceful path forward. The death of a parent, devastating as it can be, always opens a door. But everyone can use a little help as they fumble toward it.