TIFF23 REVIEW: His Three Daughters [2024]

Rating: R | Runtime: 101 minutes
Release Date: September 6th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Netflix
Director(s): Azazel Jacobs
Writer(s): Azazel Jacobs

The rest is just fantasy.

These are the words Christina (Elisabeth Olsen) remembers her father saying when a character was dying in an old movie the two were watching shortly after her stepmother passed. He told her that death is really about absence and not the nostalgic sentimentality Hollywood creates for tears. But those who survive the dead might also find something real within that absence. Especially when they least expect it. When it seems that a shared death might also be a goodbye for each other too, it might bring them together instead.

The leads in writer/director Azazel Jacobs’ latest His Three Daughters definitely aren’t expecting much from their current ordeal. While Christina is still off-screen awaiting her rambling introduction, we enter the apartment these sisters all grew up in as Katie (Carrie Coon) is chastising Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) for doing “everything” wrong. We don’t know the details of that argument yet, but we can still discern Katie’s indignation is born from within rather than anything Rachel did or didn’t do. This anger is about her own regrets. Sadly, Rachel, fully cognizant of such, has never felt respected enough to call it out.

Why? Because she isn’t Vincent’s biological daughter. Despite him being the only father she’s ever known, there’s always been an invisible divider making Rachel feel “less than” in her sisters’ eyes It doesn’t matter she’s the one who stayed by his side and helped him through the cancer currently placing Vincent in Hospice care. Katie still describes her as being “raised as a daughter”—a qualifier that only carries more weight considering she, a “real” daughter, didn’t do enough to reciprocate that apparently very important bond. So, the friction becomes palpable. Katie enters Rachel’s home and adopts a persona of “Mom.” With zero right, the rules are suddenly hers.

The fireworks that ensue prove to be the meat of this story as these women interact with a combination of communal sorrow and individualized pain. They should be able to talk to each other. To explain where they’re coming from and help prop the other up, but that’s never been their relationship—at least not within the last decade or so. They grew older, started families of their own, and drifted apart like all siblings do at some point. And they became such different people that they stopped keeping in touch beyond the usual holiday platitudes. So, coming together now breeds undue tension and the threat of disrepair rather than reconciliation.

It’s a master class of acting with the trio pretty much carrying the entire film themselves within the limited space of an apartment, the supporting characters they interact with either giving room for more friction or the compassion they should be giving each other. It could easily be adapted for the stage—especially with a few heavy monologues delivering more exposition than emotion. But Coon, Olsen, and Lyonne understand their roles and the dynamics between them. They understand that the posturing of the words can be matched by the cold temperature necessitating it. Katie is always talking down to Rachel. Rachel is always meeting her with shocked silence. And Christina puts on a smile to pretend their world isn’t crumbling.

As such, it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the best scenes comes courtesy of an outsider’s perspective. Jovan Adepo’s Benji becomes an objective observer despite his subjective presence, a character with nothing to lose by laying the truth everyone knows but won’t say out aloud. The explosion has as much potential for derailing progress as it does waking these women up to the truth that they’ve insulated themselves with incomplete realities of who their dad was to them alone. Everything revolves around that unfortunate division to drive them further apart when they should be trying to understand and merge those perspectives into one communal picture.

And they do eventually. It might prove tenuous and of the moment, but walls are slowly coming down regardless of whether they go back up later. Jacobs makes a very interesting choice in order to visualize what that means (yes, you will finally see Vincent, as played by Jay O. Sanders), but boy does it pack a punch when you find yourself fighting back eyerolls and when you realize what’s actually happening. It makes sense because this too is a movie that deserves some fantasy. But rather than talk down to the audience through it, Jacobs allows it the complexity of providing context while also confirming a heartbreakingly tragic truth.

Those final moments won’t be easy to shake. Not the climax and its blurring of reality nor the inevitable open-ended epilogue set to Olsen singing “Five Little Ducks.” It’s the care and attention to letting emotions speak for themselves (literally and figuratively respectively) that makes His Three Daughters so potent. Because where most films would have Katie take her frustrations out on her sisters only to have them violently dish it back, Jacobs understands silence hurts worse because it denies the distraction from acknowledging the pain she’s caused. And it’s the same in happier times too. Sitting together in silence can repair some wounds. Being present doesn’t always have to be so loud.