The women of His Three Daughters are grieving in very different ways. Their father is on his deathbed, and the sisters are cohabitating in tense fashion: Katie (Carrie Coon) is micromanaging, Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) is doing breathing exercises, and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) is smoking lots and lots of weed.
Writer-director Azazel Jacobs intended his film to capture the way people’s lives carry them away from one another, only to bring them back together at the most inopportune moments. The film covers only three and a half days in the lives of the siblings, but it often feels like a lifetime. “I’ve found time moving in inexplicable ways in the end-of-life experiences I’ve had with family and friends,” Jacobs told Netflix. “One thing that should take minutes seems to stretch out way longer, and other moments collapse into one another.”
All of which is to say: Katie, Christina, and Rachel are bound to get a little tired of one another. As the film unfolds, mostly within the confines of the family apartment, old tensions rise to the surface, and the family struggles to keep it together as they prepare to say goodbye to the one thing they share: their father, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders).
Jacobs wrote His Three Daughters specifically for Coon, Olsen, and Lyonne. “When Katie came out a certain way, I realized Carrie has a similar strength,” Jacobs told Netflix. “The way Christina is a different character who is trying to keep the peace between her sisters, I’ve seen that quality in Lizzie’s previous work. And the same thing with Natasha being this kind of laid-back person the way Rachel is.”
Of course, those personalities aren’t necessarily always in tune with one another. Tension flares up over Rachel, who’s been living with and caring for their father while her sisters remain with their families. Katie in particular unleashes a stream of criticism in Rachel’s direction, from the contents of the fridge (just apples) to her lack of motivation.
“Rachel is the sister who is genuinely showing up the most for our father, but she’s getting flak because she hasn’t had any tangible life achievements, these imagined or constructed metrics by which we identify a success or failure,” Lyonne told Netflix. “Over the course of the movie, she develops the skill to stand up for herself and say, ‘Hey, that’s not the full picture.’ ”
Part of that skill comes from her boyfriend, Benjy (Jovan Adepo), who gives Katie a stern talking-to after she tries to start a fight over him visiting the apartment. He points out that although Katie thinks he’s a stranger, they’ve actually met before — and that the apples in the fridge are not a product of Rachel’s laziness, but instead the only food that Vincent would eat while Rachel was caring for him alone.
Katie tries to apologize to Rachel, but emotions continue to run high, as Katie frantically compartmentalizes her grief. “I related very much to Katie’s desire to be in charge of everything because it gives an illusion of control in a situation wherein you have absolutely no control,” Coon said. “It’s a surrogate for dealing with any kind of emotional distress that arises in that situation. She constantly needs to be doing something.”
Christina struggles to keep the peace as her sisters increasingly aim for each other’s throats. “There’s a softness to Christina, and the idea of being a nurturer and a caretaker was something I was interested in exploring,” Olsen said. But even Christina, ever the peacemaker, eventually loses her cool, forcing the sisters to sit down and talk through their differences. It doesn’t go well; Katie picks a fight over the lease to Vincent’s rent-controlled apartment and accuses stepdaughter Rachel of not being as much Vincent’s daughter as she and Christina are.
It’s a shattering thing to say to Rachel; blood relation or not, Vincent is the only father figure she’s ever had. “The fact that her sisters see her that way is why Rachel is always going outside to smoke and will talk to anybody in the neighborhood as if they’re her best friend,” Lyonne said.
The next day brings reconciliation: Katie and Rachel tentatively reconnect as they bond over hospice worker Angel’s (Rudy Galvan) repeated mantra that this feels like Vincent’s final day. The sisters work on their father’s obituary, and Katie apologizes, telling Rachel she hopes she stays in the apartment, because she’d like it to remain in the family. The sisters head into Vincent’s room to sit at his side. And then things change.
Suddenly, Vincent struggles to ask his daughters to move him into his favorite chair in the living room. As they do so, he begins to come back to life, walking around the room with energy, reading over his own obituary and shouting out changes — specifically, making clear that he sees Rachel as his daughter just as much as Katie and Christina. He waxes rhapsodic about his life, about his love for his children and his home. His daughters sit at his knee and listen as he tries to build a better relationship for them.
It all seems too good to be true … because it is. Vincent turns and sees himself, still in his armchair, with his daughters crowded around him in tears. The last few minutes, the stories he’s told, the relationships he’s solidified, the closure he’s achieved, all exist only in his dying mind.
But back in reality, his peaceful passing does seem to have helped his three daughters mend fences. The film flashes forward as the three sisters say their loving goodbyes to each other, and then flashes back to the immediate aftermath of their father’s death, as Christina sings a gentle lullaby. And Rachel, now free from Katie’s complaints and welcome to smoke inside if she wants to, still heads out to a bench and takes in the New York air.
“And all those crazy little ducks came back,” she remembers Katie completing Christina’s lullaby. Rachel laughs. It’s a joke that recalls her own suggestion for Vincent’s obituary: “Married a couple of crazy bitches, raised a few crazy bitches.” As they begin to come out on the other side of grief, these crazy little ducks have, indeed, come back together as a family.
His Three Daughters is now streaming on Netflix.
