Christina recalls a time when she and her dad were watching a movie that had a death in it and he made a point to her that real death was never like it was in the movies. He told her, “The only way to communicate how death really feels is through absence. Everything else is fantasy.” Greg MacArthur, ScreenRant, regarding His Three Daughters
In writer/director Azazel Jacobs‘s His Three Daughters (Netflix), three talented female actors play three sisters: Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne). Reportedly, Jacobs created these roles with these specific actors in mind.
Lindsey Bahr, APNews, sets up this highly rated film: “The three women have gathered in their father’s small New York apartment for his final days. He’s barely conscious, confined to a room that they take shifts monitoring as they wait out this agonizingly unspecific clock. But even absent the stresses of hospice, tensions would be high for Christina, Katie and Rachel, estranged and almost strangers who are about to lose the one thread still binding them.”
Katie: “She’s the eldest, a type-A ball of anxiety, the mother of a difficult teenage daughter and the type of person who can barely conceal either disappointment or deep resentment. Katie also lives in Brooklyn, not far from her father, but rarely ever visited.”
Christina: “…a head-in-the-clouds, conflict averse yogi and Grateful Dead follower who lives across the country and has had to leave her 3-year-old for the first time.”
Rachel: “…an unemployed stoner who never left home, likes to bet on football games and is poised to inherit the apartment – to the not-so-subtle resentment of her sisters.”
The trailer:
Grief Process
Each daughter is in anticipatory grief mode; each, of course, handles it in her own unique way. On the surface at least, Katie is all business, a control freak: get the DNR signed ASAP, write the obituary now—go, go, go. Christina repeatedly claims she’s fine while we know she’s not. Rachel, who as Dad’s roommate/caregiver knows his decline all too well, manifests detachment, avoidance, and rebellion in the sudden presence of her sisters.
***Significant spoilers ahead***
Family History
Rachel is not the others’ biological sister. Vincent’s first wife died, and several years later he remarried a woman who’d already had Rachel. The latter is older than Christina, younger than Katie. Vincent raised Rachel as his own. Vincent has borne significant grief, as have all three sisters in losing their respective mothers.
The Ending
Efforts to bond and/or get past grievances have proven unsuccessful. But the sisters do unite in an effort to escort their nearly dead father (Jay O. Sanders) from his bed to his living room chair.
In an unexpected turn, Vincent then disconnects from his medical devices. He stands. He gives a lengthy coherent monologue that zeroes in on his daughters’ areas of conflict and reflections on his life.
Brianna Zigler,AVClub: “…(T)he climax of His Three Daughters could be seen as something of a self-aware jest at the very fantastical, movie-centric idea that people could ever think of exactly what to say to their loved ones in the short time that they have left with them.”
Kristy Pushko, Mashable, acknowledges that this fantasy climax “may prove polarizing — arguably breaking from the rest of the film’s logic.” On the other hand for her “it deepened the sense of absence, giving audiences a grander understanding of who the eponymous heroines lose when they lose Vincent.”
