‘His Three Daughters’: Toronto Review

Dir/scr: Azazel Jacobs. US. 2023. 101mins 

His Three Daughters, a tear-jerking drama, understands that grief requires space. It is filmed mostly in one location, a modest New York City apartment, that becomes more cramped with every passing second. Three disparate sisters have gathered for the final days of their father’s life: severe eldest daughter Katie (Carrie Coon), salty middle child Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) and the youngest, the zen Christina (Elizabeth Olsen). Writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ follows a thorny clashing of charged personalities, unresolved grievances, and past traumas, boiling over in between the doors, walls, and rooms of a home defined by an unmistakable absence. This melodrama should discover momentum with art house audiences on the strength of its three leads, who are easy selling points for distributors looking for an awards play. 

An intensely composed elegy about the devastating effect of saying goodbye to a parent

The film’s stirring opening exemplifies Jacobs’ trust in his seasoned performers. Coon as Katie occupies an empty background. With the camera locked on her, she chastises her sports gambler sister Rachel for not getting their dad to sign a DNR. Jacob cuts to a blank-faced Rachel, then to a peacemaking Christina. “I’m not making this a thing,” says Katie. She will of course make the DNR a very big thing. Through the early going, the sisters are so distant, so unlike each other, that cinematographer Sam Levy forces them to occupy compositions alone. It takes at least ten minutes for Kate and Christina to be in the same shot, a little bit longer for the same to happen with Christina and Rachel, while Rachel and Kate (the sisters with the deepest personal wedge) are the last to see eye to eye. 

In the spaces where the characters are alone, sound can fill the void. The obvious example is the constant heart monitor beeping from their father’s room. But it can also occur through voices. To avoid fighting with Kate, Rachel spends much of her time either outside smoking weed (on Kate’s instructions) or within her room hearing the various conversations which are taking place behind the walls. A homesick Christina shares sweet phone calls with her young girl; Kate’s phone conversations are less calm, as she tries to make amends with her rebellious teenage daughter. 

Missing in all of this is the “his” of the title. Their father Vincent (Jay O Sanders) remains mostly off screen, unconscious and near death in a room drenched in red lighting. Outside of that room, Levy pitches the apartment scenes in warm tones, adding a tranquil tension to the taut atmosphere. Their hospice caregiver Angel (Rudy Galvan), an irony the sisters can’t help but smirk at all, sometimes visits, giving the viewer verbal landmarks of how soon Vincent will die. Rachel’s boyfriend, played by a mesmerszing Jovan Adepo, also drops by. He confronts Kate about her patronising habits, her way of looking past (Black) people, and her verbal abuse levied at Rachel, who she considers a mismanaging ne’er-do-well pothead unworthy of inheriting their father’s rent-controlled apartment. 

A swiftly paced film, the mood tightens in building anticipation for these siblings to unleash their rage. When the explosion occurs, it’s a chain reaction of tears, hurts, and wounds that speak to how siblings under the same roof can have different relationships to parents which later inform their adulthood. There’s some over-calibration in the three actresses’ performances, you can see the work. With time, however, their clear ticks become engrossing trademarks, particularly Olsen’s deft ability to give a sly wink and smile before exiting stage left, Lyonne’s protection of the raw inside of Rachel, and Coon’s hardened responses that hides a tragic core.   

Jacobs’ firmly constructed melodrama, ends on a bit of wish fulfillment. It’s an initially puzzling decision considering Olsen delivers a monologue about how the arts always get death wrong; it’s not the act of passing but the absence of a loved one that marks grief. The daydream that happens seems to contradict that sentiment until you realise who it belongs to. While that decision is an emotional shortcut, knowingly pulling at the heartstrings for maximum effect, the sentiment is so vulnerable it’s difficult not to be obliterated by tears and memories of loved ones long past gone. The heartbreaking plunge into sisterhood and grief that is His Three Daughters is an intensely composed elegy about the devastating effect of saying goodbye to a parent.