‘His Three Daughters’ Is One of the Best Films of the Year

By the end of Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters, I could have drawn a detailed architectural blueprint of its central location, a rent-controlled New York apartment. For almost the entire runtime, the title characters are trapped there together — and we with them — as they await their father’s impending death. While hospice care takes its course, the daughters struggle to coexist in their cramped family home.

The place is spacious by the standards of Manhattan apartments — which is to say, tiny by any other standard. The daughters do not get along. It’s been a long time since all three were together for any length of time. But now their father is dying, and they must be there to witness the end. So they keep crossing paths in the apartment’s main hallway down to the dad’s room, in the narrow kitchen off to left side, and in the living room slash dining room where they occasionally eat together but more often stare coldly at one another as they retreat back to their own private spaces.

What a sense of place this movie has. And a sense of time, with the hours and days in that apartment slowly creeping by as the distant beep of the father’s EKG marks the seconds passing one by one. And a sense of real, lived-in domestic battles, with the emotional tug of war between talkative Katie (Carrie Coon), upbeat Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), and distant Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), who’s served as their father’s primary caregiver for years but keeps serving as the target of all of Katie’s frustrations anyway.

READ MORE: The Worst Movies of 2024 So Far

His Three Daughters takes its time to elucidate the reasons for the rift between the women. One of the astonishing things about the film is how clear the precise nature of the strife is from almost the very first scene, just because of the way these terrific actresses relate to one another on screen. When you have Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne as your central stars, some things don’t need to be said out loud.

Then again, this film is not about a say things out loud kind of family. Jacobs has crafted an authentic portrait of the sort of clan where grudges are held in perpetuity so they can be hinted at in muttered asides and insinuations. If you grew up in a family like this, spent time around a family like this, the dynamics between these three women will be immediately recognizable; with Katie and Rachel constantly at odds and Christina cast in the role of perpetual peacemaker.

Jacobs’ script is masterful in the ways it withholds and reveals information, and it observes with piercing clarity the mundane horror of watching a loved one slowly succumb to cancer. The claustrophobic atmosphere in that apartment is only occasionally released when Rachel sneaks away to smoke some weed (Katie despises the habit and demands she smoke outside). This house would be a pressure cooker of family resentments under the best of circumstances. With their father dying just down the hall, the issues between the three that have simmered for years finally boil over.

His Three Daughters uses the father in this scenario in fascinating ways. Despite the tight confines and the hours the women spend in their dad’s room, the camera never ventures in there with them. As time passes, we become acutely aware that while the father is a topic of constant discussion, he’s never shown on camera. He’s an absence at the center of the film that seems to foreshadow the main characters’ lives after he’s gone.

The movies’ ending pays off this approach, although discussing precisely how and why feels like a spoiler. So I will just say that these scenes not only surprised me, they somehow left me both devastated and elated. It’s tragic to watch these events unfold, but the way Jacobs handles them is so bold and unusual that I had a big smile on my face even as tears rolled down my cheeks.

That was the last time I cried at His Three Daughters, but not the first. The climactic scene when these characters finally clear the air between them is even more powerful. All three actresses are outstanding, but Lyonne’s performance is astonishing in its nuances. In recent years, she has become one of our most dependable comedic actresses on shows like Russian Doll and Poker Face. Lyonne gets several big laughs in His Three Daughters with her typically dry delivery, but Rachel shows off her dramatic range as well.

The fact that all three stars share top billing with roles are of similar sizes might make awards nominations hard to come by; I could easily see them splitting votes. Personally, I really hope Lyonne doesn’t get overlooked. This is one of the finest performances by an actress I have seen in a while.

His Three Daughters opens in limited release in theaters this weekend before premiering on Netflix later this month. How many people will watch the film on streaming is something I’m curious about. In my experience, people tend to turn on Netflix to get away from situations like the one depicted in His Three Daughters, which is why I assume the vast majority of the company’s “original” movies are bland genre filler with loglines so generic and derivative they sound like they were written by ChatGPT.

I hope people give this movie a chance anyway, whether it’s in a theater or on streaming. I’m going to be thinking about that apartment, and the people in it, for a very long time.

RATING: 9/10