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.

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