“If there is any guilt I have, it’s that maybe I should have… I could have expressed myself better”. These are among the last words of a dying father to his three daughters. Who can not rely on that regret? Certainly, the three sisters, the main characters of His Three Daughters, for the whole movie are trapped in a limbo of what they feel and what they end up saying. Maybe because of the universalism of such feeling, or because of the cast’s overall great performance, in the last twenty minutes, an overall predictable family drama turns into a surreal and honest love story. It clings to the softest spots humans have. It does so in a rather disarming manner, direct and truthful, avoiding banality. It is finally the wonder the spectator has been waiting for more than an hour. His Three Daughters is the latest film by New Yorker director Azabel Jacobs. It premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2023 and was directly purchased by Netflix who released it internationally on late September 2024.
Katie (Carrie Coon), Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), and Christina (Elisabeth Olsen) reunite in their family’s apartment in New York. Their father Vincent (Jay O. Sanders) is dying and they want to be there for him, for each other, but probably most of all for themselves. For the image they have of themselves and that they want to keep in front of each other, and society. This is represented by the two carers (Rudy Galvan and Jasmine Bracey) who daily visit the house to assess Vincent’s proximity to death, Rachel’s partner (Jovan Adepo), and the building’s security guard (Jose Febus). Almost as a mantra, during the film, it is often repeated that It’s right to be there, together, all the three of them, just the three of them. And so the days pass by within the familiar walls, between meals, phone calls, TV, pot smoking, singing, writing, and yoga. Each sister has their own way of coping with the sorrow and their father’s approaching death. However, there is only one activity that seems to unite them all: fighting. The three women constantly mistreat and despise each other. They do so, according to an apparently very obvious and repetitive scheme which however is not entirely clear until the obituary Katie is writing about her father, reveals the most obvious. The sporadic intrusions from the outside world seem to be the only moments in which their diabolic and perverse mechanism of necrotic self-destruction manifests as absurdity. In that rare moment, a few scenes of lightness are brought in. Mainly, instead of supporting each other through pain, the three top up each other hardship. As often it is, in the best families.
Director Azabel Jacobs has the merit of diving right into the crudest family dynamics. This seems to be his area of expertise, as proven in his previous movies like The Lovers (2017) about a dysfunctional couple, The French Exit(2020) about a complex mother-son relationship, and his debut Momma’s Man(2008) about a penitent absent father. Steady close-ups, warm colors, and detailed-oriented photography contribute to the creation of an intimate atmosphere that drags the spectator right into the scene. However, this familiar setting often spills over into an uncomfortable claustrophobic feeling, where the spectator becomes an odd voyeur, you are watching but would like to look away. The overall vibes remind us of movies like Carnage (2011) by Roman Polanski, Shiva Baby (2021) by Emma Seligman, and the Netflix production A Marriage Story (2019) by Noah Baumbach. The house is one of the protagonists of the movie, as it also becomes an object of contention among the sisters. The different spaces, whether of isolation and/or interaction, are magistrally directed, leaving Vincent’s room as a mysterious, only vaguely imaginable, fortress of the Holy Grail, from where peace will descend in the end.
His Three Daughters seems to be trapped in a limbo between an original independent movie and a big Hollywood production, where foreseeability is balanced out with at times an odd tempo and intense dialogues sustained by dense performances. Also, the three impressive leading actresses, who could have been made to shine brighter, seem to be caged in way too banal characters. The stoner, the neurotic, and the perfectionists are deconstructed only at the end of the movie when Vicent shows the unpredictable sides of his three daughters. Only daddy seems to know the true self of his girls. He is key to unblocking the situation, the whole movie. But are twenty minutes enough? And isn’t it too paternalistic? Wouldn’t have been nice to dive into more complexity before? A glimpse was always there but buried in too much mannerism. If on the one hand, some dialogues stand out for spontaneity and wittiness, such as “Married three crazy bitches, raised a few of them”, the whole first part of the movie is a foreseeable enacted screenplay. But maybe this is exactly what people do in solemn moments like weddings, birthdays, funerals, and so on. They perform for the world and for themselves, according to the rules of their society or family. This witty drama leaves the spectator with precisely this question: what do we feel and what do we share with the outer world? Jacob’s latest movie drags the spectator into a state between love and hate, a feeling usually awoken by family. And this might be His Three Daughters’ biggest achievement: it sticks to you more than you would like it to, like a family fight. It does not leave you indifferent.
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