His Three Daughters was a tough film to sit through, and it’s not because of the quality of the film. This film deals with people losing a parent, which is a pretty hard thing to deal with and a concept to even conceive at times. After I saw this film, I told some of my fellow critic friends who’ve lost a parent that this might be too much for them. As I sat there watching this story of three women in a New York City rent-controlled apartment as their father is close to death in hospice care. The sisters have a lot of unspoken issues with each other that come to a head as they come to terms with the glue of their core familial unit. It has dynamics you’ve seen before in real life, television, and many films, but that never stops it from feeling authentic, genuine, and human. With a small cast, mainly in that apartment and occasionally in the courtyard, it’s a film that feels like a play being adapted. I don’t say that as a detriment but just because of how intimate it feels. While these are actresses, you know they quickly become these characters and people you might know or at least have seen before in real life.
Carrie Coon plays Katie, and Elizabeth Olsen plays Christina who is the two sisters who share the same mother, Vincent’s (Jay O. Sanders) first wife, and Natasha Lyonne plays Rachel, the stepdaughter from his second marriage leads to most of the conflict we see in this film as Katie and Rachel constantly butt heads as Katie, being the oldest likes to assert her power back in the apartment that Rachel lives in with their father being the primary caregiver up until this point. The two women essentially revert to their teenage selves as Katie lets her assumptions about Rachel get the best of her. Coon plays Katie as the type A upper-middle-class white lady that takes it upon herself to do everything only in her way and then gets resentful of everyone else when others just give up and let them have their way. She’s very annoying, and this performance is so believable and honest that, as I said earlier, I forgot she was an actress. Olsen plays the more hippie-coded youngest sister whose life seems perfect to her sisters. Olsen plays this character in a very conflicted manner and, in many ways, hides something while also being the peacemaker of the sisters. Seeing her in this, at least for me, felt good after all the years of being the Scarlet Witch, but now she’s just an ordinary person dealing with some quite normal life things. Her scenes with Coon, through her lack of talking, say so much to Katie, especially in regards to Rachel and her feelings.
Speaking of Rachel, this is Natasha Lyonne’s film, by the way. The Rachel character is the one we pretty much view the story through. We see Rachel become the middle kid of the family again. She closes up in her room and comes out only to really smoke weed outside because her sister doesn’t like it, and Rachel doesn’t want to fight. She’s the one who lives with their father, and you can see how much these last days have been destroying her. In many ways, her sisters are ignoring these things. She’s just going to let them have their time, and she’s going to smoke. There is so much her character is doing that is apparent, especially to a person who’s lost a parent. That part of the film is what I connected to the most and was the part that made me the most sad. Lyonne’s performance is one of the best I’ve seen this year in terms of being relatable, as she is in most of the stuff she is in, but it also destroys you with the subtly of her despair onscreen.
I’ll be honest; if I knew what the film was about, maybe I wouldn’t have seen it, as sometimes this subject brings up feelings and memories that you might not want to return to. I don’t want to sound like this isn’t a great film, because it is. It just handles a challenging subject and does so very well, yet it is also something that I currently would’ve avoided. I’m not mad that I saw it; I still think about it since I saw it over a week and a half ago. His Three Daughters is an excellent drama with compelling performances, especially by Natasha Lyonne, and is a great start to their prestige film season on Netflix.
Score: B+
