His Three Daughters
First screened in January 2025
Director: Azazel Jacobs. Cast: Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olson, Rudy Galvan, Jose Febus, Jasmine Bracey, Jay O. Sanders. Screenplay: Azazel Jacobs.

 In Brief: Rare for a movie to rebound so strongly from a stilted start. Characters deepen. Writing, directing aim higher.

VOR: ③  I understand folks who see a familiar, stage-adjacent dialogue-driven drama. I see some originality as structure changes, story unfolds.


   
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My guess about what happened with the stilted start of His Three Daughters is that writer-director Azazel Jacobs goaded his three leads to lean aggressively into the performative personae they'd bring into a heavily trip-wired caretaking scenario of uncomfortable and, for them, unusual and unwanted intimacy. So Natasha Lyonne is all aloof avoidance, Elizabeth Olsen is all and I mean all keep-it-light domestic nicety, and Carrie Coon is all and I mean all, ALL, ALL!! brittle and bitchy 200mph verbal hostility. Did Jacobs hope to convey right away that these are all self-protective masks, unlikely to survive the duration of the task? Was he clumsily trying to set stark goalposts by which viewers could measure each woman's shift in comportment and feeling? Those strategies all make sense on paper, but at least as executed, they sure do imply a failure of trust in the subtler skills of his performers and the perceptual wherewithal of his audience, stuck with a way higher barrier to dramatic entry than His Three Daughters ought to have. The contrast between these heavily mannered performances and the clean, effective directness of, say, Rudy Galvan as the hospice worker or Jose Febus as a building manager yields an internal asymmetry as to how this movie is meant to feel stylistically, all at the expense of the most central characters. The camera's ostentatious refusal to cross the threshold into the bedroom where the father of these three sisters is malingering at death's door amplifies the feeling that His Three Daughters is an exercise, structured more by conceits, even gimmicks, than emotional realities.

Color me happy and grateful, then, that almost all of these problems dissipated for me around the halfway point. I'm used to feeling the opposite in grief dramas, on stage or on film: actors getting a lot of room to be loose, engaging, and dramedically nimble at the start until the push toward stormy soliloquies and big revelations starts coarsening the performances and, with it, the piece. For me, the opposite transpired in His Three Daughters. Once the characters stop denying their harsher judgments of each other and getting into bristly tussles, they start feeling like credible people—not just types, or entrants in a triangulated duel, or stand-ins for different ways to inhabit grief. Even better, the actors get to become interactors, in more than two-by-two combinations and with shifting sympathies and alliances among them.

The turning point for me was a midfilm set/spike combo. First, Jovan Adepo, as the Lyonne character's maybe-boyfriend, vents an important critique about one of the protagonists that is but isn't just addressed to the caretaking quagmire. That intervention is shot in such a way that a third character's silent, subtly prismatic reactions get some interesting screen time, carefully blocked. Shortly after, Lyonne herself uncracks the frustrating, typecasty carapace of her character, expertly delivering an important semi-monologue that's a sharp corrective to one sister and an emotionally risky out-loud admission to herself, rooted in a naked vulnerability that, without any over-playing, changed my view of this character and this actress. While observing and listening to Lyonne, Olsen's work deepens in shading, depth, and surprise almost at the same time, and Coon, starting from furthest behind, at least starts getting somewhere, even as she remains least well-served by the script.

His Three Daughters isn't flawless through its second half, partly because there's still some ungainliness in its concepts, partly because it's willing to take some admirable gambles likely to divide people. Several of those worked for me, including a highwire transformation and long, heartfelt speech from a character we don't see coming. Let's say that this gutsy swing offers a perspective to someone who, in life and in storytelling, is often denied any perspective at all, much less such a rich and surprising one. Jacobs executes this gesture with double risk and double reward, since the movie gets pulled simultaneously into greater warmth and greater sadness. The camera and the cutting patterns also inherit new challenges in this sequence, and I admire how they responded.

Does the resolution of His Three Daughters feel a little pat, not just based on what we've seen and learned of these characters but given what many of us have observed about the typical afterlife of forced, deathbed closeness among mutually allergic family members? Yes. Does Jacobs seem to know this, using his edits in an all-new way to undermine a possible plume of pure wish fulfillment? Yes. Did the movie give me new ideas about what dying might be all about from multiple sides, or what doormen and hospice workers are navigating every day, or what the tenacious stoner on her chosen park bench outside your home or along your path might be dealing with? Yes. I was moderately hopeful about His Three Daughters on the way in, roundly soured in my expectations through its longish first act, and then strongly, unpredictably won over by its back half. Beyond improving, the film really endeared itself to me and reminded me not to shut myself off from the ever-present possibility that if you hang in there with an awkward, mixed-bag movie, it might still emerge as a special one. Grade: B

Awards:
Independent Spirit Awards: Robert Altman Award (director and ensemble)
Chicago Film Critics Association: Best Supporting Actress (Lyonne)
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