Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen and Carrie Coon in His three daughters.
Photo: Sam Levy/Netflix

Azazel Jacobs His three daughters begins with a series of dense, almost theatrical monologues delivered by the three adult children of a dying man. It’s an impressive, potentially fatal beginning for a film, but the women in question are played by three enormously talented actresses. First up is Carrie Coon’s Katie, who has taken on the role of the adult in the room herself, hurriedly reciting a list of tasks, observations and subtle complaints to her sister Rachel (Natasha Lyonne). She’s followed by Elizabeth Olsen’s Christina, the demure and proper youngest of the three, who currently seems to spend most of her time watching over her father, who is hooked up to a morphine IV in his bedroom and receiving hospice care at home. Christina’s wide-eyed motherliness nonetheless suggests deep doubts; she’s the kind of person who ends her statements with a quick nod, as if trying to convince herself that what she’s just said is the truth. And then there’s Lyonne’s Rachel, the overwhelmed stoner who has lived with her aging father in this New York apartment for years, though now she can’t bring herself to enter his room. Rachel doesn’t talk, but rather reacts, trying to process the torrent of words from her sisters – who are actually her adopted sisters, since Rachel was raised by her father as his own child after he married her mother many years ago.

Jacobs’ film, now streaming on Netflix, is not a sequel in that genre. The initial bout of theatricality soon wears off as these three very different women, each in their own way, try to deal with the fact that their father doesn’t have long to be in this world. For most of the film, we don’t even see him. Mostly, these women — who have grown apart but aren’t quite estranged — lash out at each other. Katie has a litany of complaints against Rachel, most notably the fact that she smokes her weed in the apartment. Of course, when Rachel tries to smoke outside, the caretaker asks her to take it inside. And while no one would describe her as compliant, she dutifully complies in both cases, shuttling between the apartment and the building’s courtyard and being verbally abused at every opportunity.

Jacobs’ script actually has a few drawbacks for Katie and Christina. One is the textbook business-savvy, middle-aged rich city girl, the other a soft-spoken suburban yoga mom. They both seem more like types than people, even flirting with parody at times. Rachel, with her live-and-let-live attitude, seems just trying to get through her sisters’ visit. It’s supposed to be a familiar dynamic, but it slips uncomfortably into the predictable, the rote. We know the film is going to complicate these characters a bit, but it never really surprises us with what it reveals about these women or their relationship with their father.

That’s not a big problem, because the actors make these people worth watching. Coon, who is so often stuck with thankless supporting roles in movies, wins our affection for Katie’s constant agitation. She has a way of looking directly at the people she’s talking to—her gaze isn’t quite withering, but it demands answers. We understand that this woman is always trying to get things done because, well, nothing else gets done. Olsen, meanwhile, finds subtle ways to suggest that Christina’s clear-headed, matter-of-fact warmth and positivity are attempts to compensate for all kinds of insecurity. And Lyonne’s raspy, understated charm makes us sympathetic to Rachel’s reckless helplessness. Again, none of this is unexpected or unusual, but these actors find ways to make it interesting.

Does all this lead to an evolution of the film? Can it? His three daughters is a movie about waiting, and it’s a movie that often feels like it’s waiting – for death, for reconciliation, for a confrontation, for something, anything. We know the sisters will understand each other a little better by the end, and Jacobs brings out some truth in how exhausting and alienating it can be to simply watch over a dying loved one day after day, with no emotional reward whatsoever. By choosing not to show the father for most of the film, he ensures that we focus on the daughters’ interactions with one another – even though so much of how they see and speak to each other is dictated by their past with their father.

Viewed that way, the film’s ending follows a strange logic. (Spoilers follow, even though this isn’t really a plot movie.) When we finally see the father (played by Jay O. Sanders) as the girls roll him out of his deathbed and place him in his favorite chair, he seems much more lucidly conscious than we’ve been led to believe. Then, in a moment of fascinating surrealism, the father rips off the various tubes covering his face and body, walks into the kitchen, pours himself a drink, and begins his own monologue about his daughters and how much he loves New York. It’s a fascinating moment — which, of course, soon turns out to be fantasy. But it feels like something from another movie, a deus ex machina meant to bring reconciliation and closure but fails to elicit any real understanding or reflection. It feels more like Jacobs just didn’t know how to end his film and just didn’t want to end it with the banal, saccharine image of a man dying. We suspect that, in his own way, he has as much trouble coming to terms with death as his characters do.