‘His Three Daughters’ Review: Azazel Jacobs’ Muddled Character Piece
While His Three Daughters contains strong performances from its trio of lead actresses, writer/director Azazel Jacobs puts them in cyclical situations that never fully forms an emotional center with the event they’re going through.
The subject treated in Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters is something each family will eventually go through. No matter what we think about life, we’re never in control of our own fate, and when the unthinkable happens, it brings us closer together to our family. That’s what Katie (Carrie Coon), Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) are now experiencing with their father, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), who is in his final days.
The three siblings have not seen each other for some time, and there’s already tension boiling between Katie and Rachel. The former does not like the fact that Rachel smokes weed in her house, while their ailing father is inhaling secondhand smoke, and brings her friend Benji (Jovan Adepo) to smoke a blunt and watch the games. In the film’s best scene, Benji confronts Katie and talks about how, every day, Rachel has cared for her father, watching sports games with him, cutting him the apples he wanted (because that’s the only thing he was able to eat), and helping him with whatever else he needed.
Adepo only appears for an extended scene, but he’s arguably the strongest and most impactful part of His Three Daughters. He not only tells Katie to back off, as she propels herself into action mode to cope with the incoming loss of her father (the only useful thing she can think of doing) but reminds the two other siblings that the only person who has been there every single day for him is Rachel. When he disappears out of the picture, it repurposes the relationship between Katie and Rachel, which grows more tense but eventually appeases when she realizes Benji has been telling the truth.
The chemistry between the three siblings is at the heart of His Three Daughters, and the reason why the movie mostly works, despite its tawdry dialogue-heavy scenes. Each sibling has distinct traits. They almost feel like polar opposites to one another. It’s insane to even think that they ever got along in a past life, because they could not be more distant to one another as they attempt to piece back their relationship when they return to send their father off. Olsen, in particular, is quite impressive as the Yoga-addicted Christina, whom Benji describes as being “on another fucking planet.” To be fair, he’s absolutely correct. She’s really weird.
But her off-kilter, quasi-peaceful demeanor hides something much darker that eventually gets revealed in the movie’s spiritual ending, which takes a massive swing that may or may not land with audiences. Though it also studies a phenomenon that many families experience as someone is about to pass away, which occurred when my grandfather transitioned from this place to somewhere inexplicable. As they experience an indescribable form of spiritual epiphany, Vincent regains his physical strength to finalize things before moving on. When Jacobs eventually cuts to the film’s most devastating image, it has impact, because the siblings have, for better or worse, reconnected with themselves, each other, and their father.
However, it takes plenty of cyclical dialogue scenes before getting to the film’s most emotional parts. Unfortunately, most of its dialogues aren’t as enthralling as Jacobs thinks they are, constantly putting the characters in repetitive, often cyclical situations that retread the same dramatic beats as the previous scene. Of course, repetition is common in films that take a huis clos approach, never fully leaving the confines of their apartment (Rachel smoking her blunt in a public bench seems worthy of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, as Azazel methodically studies a gesture that occurs always at the same time daily), but its dramatic center never expands beyond the facile rivalries of the three siblings until its ending.
As a result, it takes a while to fully get invested into the dramatic crux of His Three Daughters, even if Sam Levy’s enveloping photography deftly plays with the spatial limitations of the apartment and represents its mounting tension through swift pans and zooms. Visual flourishes like these, alongside strong performances from both Olsen and Coon (it’s too bad Natasha Lyonne is constantly being type casted as the same chatty Russian Doll-like character with little to no emotional complexity) keep the movie on its feet.
Whether you’ll ultimately like the movie or not likely has to do with your perception of the ending. As someone who lost people within my family, such a conclusion honestly makes a lot of sense, and you’d sometimes wish it occurs the way it did for the three siblings as they said goodbye to their father (Sanders’ portrayal of Vincent is also deeply heartfelt). It was also the single element that was the most talked about as the (sold-out) audience got out of the movie’s only Montreal theatrical screening. Apparently, and according to Ted Sarandos, audiences only want to see Netflix movies at home.