His Three Daugh­ters review – fires on all pistons

Are there three more bru­tal words in the Eng­lish lan­guage than ​“do not resus­ci­tate”? They elic­it a chill when spo­ken in con­cert, their inti­ma­tions cov­er­ing all the bases from cru­el-to-be-kind famil­ial oblig­a­tion to some­thing dark­er about tak­ing the final­i­ty of some­one else’s exis­tence into your own hands. We know straight away that cul­tured fuss­bud­get Katie (Car­rie Coon) has a dash of evil in her blood, as she’s fix­at­ed with try­ing to coerce her seri­ous­ly-ail­ing father to scrib­ble his John Han­cock onto a DNR form lest the sav­age New York nurs­es break a rib in their attempts to pro­long his life. Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) is hap­py for Katie to do her thing as long as it means they don’t have to con­verse, while mild­ly dip­py Christi­na (Eliz­a­beth Olsen) jug­gles the melan­choly of death with the ela­tion of life and the prospect of hop­ping back on a plane to her young family.

Azazel Jacobs (son of struc­tural­ist film­mak­er god­head Ken Jacobs) has made some intrigu­ing incur­sions into the light indie com­e­dy space with films like Momma’s Man and French Exit, yet His Three Daugh­ters is clos­er to a Bergmanesque cham­ber dra­ma in which coiled bit­ter­ness and pet­ty recrim­i­na­tion is nev­er far from tip­ping into the domes­tic discourse. 

The sto­ry spans the father’s final cou­ple of days, though Jacobs nev­er allows us to enter the room and mon­i­tor how his daugh­ters inter­act with this mys­te­ri­ous patri­arch. Which, in the case or Rachel, doesn’t real­ly mat­ter as she has no incli­na­tion to see her beloved pops in this state. In this case, the process of pre-griev­ing takes the form of irri­ta­tion and resent­ment, snip­ing about who makes the food and does the chores, yet it’s hard to deny that this unlove­ly state of being is pow­ered by the knowl­edge that a wave of sad­ness and con­fu­sion will soon to crash over these characters. 

Jacobs embraces the dra­mat­ic lim­i­ta­tions of his con­fined set-up (essen­tial­ly, it’s two rooms and cor­ri­dor and a bench), and has made sure that the words in his lit­er­ate and insight­ful script are able to do the heavy lift­ing. And the actors, too, speak those words with great con­vic­tion and thought, and their char­ac­ters are present and pri­mal and so, so flawed in a way that makes them very relatable. 

In the case of Katie, though, per­haps she is a lit­tle too flawed, as her utter awful­ness nudges the emo­tion­al equi­lib­ri­um of bal­ance and makes it very easy for the view­er to take sides against her. And on the oth­er side there’s sports-lov­ing, blunt-smok­ing Rachel, who lived with their father and must accept the bur­den of inher­it­ing his house in return for the years of hap­py com­pan­ion­ship she gave him.

The film is too quick to hand out its moments of redemp­tion, and there’s a feel­ing that Jacobs paints him­self into a cor­ner with the inevitabil­i­ty of the out­come. Olsen plays the inter­me­di­ary, and her char­ac­ter has has a few sur­pris­es (the band she’s obsessed with is a par­tic­u­lar­ly hilar­i­ous rev­e­la­tion, but one that’s very apt). How we deal with death in the absolute moment is a fas­ci­nat­ing sub­ject, and one that His Three Daugh­ters has many orig­i­nal thoughts about. In the end, it tack­les the howl­ing messi­ness with an earned mea­sure of lev­i­ty and wisdom.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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