His Three Daughters

Grade: A-

Netflix has been killing it with their original movies. In the past month alone, I’ve enjoyed Incoming (it’s American Pie for this generation), and Rebel Ridge is one of the more exciting action thrillers I’ve seen. Now we have the touching drama His Three Daughters. Writer/director Azazel Jacobs has put together one of the finest ensembles of the year.

Unless something tragic happens to you first, one day, you will bury your parents. The plot of His Three Daughters involves three sisters, with various degrees of estrangement, reuniting in their childhood apartment to be with their ailing father on his final days. He is unresponsive, and on life support at this point. I should clarify the sibling relationship. There are two sisters who had the same mother and him as their father. Rachel, played by Natasha Lyonne, is literally a red-headed stepchild. She is the daughter of his second wife. Rachel never really knew her biological father, and she grew up with the other two sisters, and was raised and loved by him like her own flesh and blood. It’s her apartment. She’s been with him the most in recent years.

Rachel is joined by the dad’s two daughters. Carrie Coon (Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire) plays Katie as a no-nonsense, serious structured taskmaster. It’s like she’s spent so much time as a mother and wife that she’s forgotten how to be a daughter or sister. The film begins with her giving an admonishment to be kind to one another, then in the next breath, naggingly lays into people for not doing assignments. She obsessively harps on about the signing of the “do not resuscitate” form. Elizabeth Olsen (Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch from the MCU) is Christina, a plucky housewife/mother who unintentionally presents a picture perfect, social media version of her life – and eventually gets called out on it. Jay O. Sanders is Vincent, the father on his way out. He was in Tumbleweeds, a wonderful film that was very influential for me. It was the first movie for which I wrote a full-length review, and possibly the reason I’m still doing it now. We do get to see some of him here.

For much of the runtime, I was utterly engrossed in the peaks, valleys, and various dramatic turns. Everyone in the cast has never been better. There is no obvious hero or villain. This isn’t like a sports game, where you only root for one team. I got around to being on everyone’s side, in individual moments. It doesn’t go for cheap tears; everything is earned. His Three Daughters says so much, and brings us into the certain world that each of us will be in, if we haven’t already.

I am on the fence about a dramatic device employed in the third act. If this were a play (and it absolutely could be; there’s just one location and only a handful of actors), I could more easily go along with what happens – and in the theatre (as opposed to the theater), it has the potential to be incredibly powerful. However, as a movie scene, it came off as cheap and jarring. There are a couple of reasons why it didn’t work for me. I wish I could talk about it more. His Three Daughters was shaping up to be a top ten of the year, but then once this moment starts, it took me out of the movie a little bit, and never rose back up after that.

It doesn’t deter that much, though, and I can’t discount what came before. This is an absorbing, touching, effective piece of cinema, slightly marred by a late chink in the armor. The grade may look like high praise, but it’s a disappointing deduction after most of it deserved a higher one.

Grade: A-