His Three Daughters is one from the talkier end of the US indie spectrum. Writer-director Azazel Jacobs, son of Ken, relocates us to a poky two-bedroom property in a lower Manhattan housing co-op, where three sisters (to be more precise, two sisters and a stepsister) are coming to terms with the fact their father, sequestered offscreen in one of those bedrooms, is entering the final stages of terminal cancer. Eldest Carrie Coon is characterised immediately by her taut black polo neck and the way she barks her opening lines directly into the lens like an army drill sergeant; her action plan, over this mournful period, is to turn everything into a confrontation. Middle daughter Elizabeth Olsen is spacier and dreamier but also more amenable, a mom who attends Grateful Dead concerts just for the time out they provide. Youngest Natasha Lyonne, meanwhile, continues to get stoned, hang out with pals and bet ineffectually on sports, anything to avoid squabbling with her siblings and the fallout from the impromptu sick bay set up next door. They all talk, nevertheless. They talk because, as anyone who's been in such situations can attest, there's nothing much else to do save sit around and wait for the sad inevitable to happen; they talk because they haven't been in the same room for a while, and therefore have much to talk about. Jacobs sets the father's gradual deterioration against an altogether more consoling renewal of bonds among his offspring: three very different personalities are seen not to merge exactly, as they might in any Bergman film on this theme, but to occupy common ground for a while, geographically, conversationally, spiritually. Good for them.
How do we feel about this? Possibly relieved, for starters, that this kind of mid-budget, low-action, non-computerised kind of filmmaking still has a place in the modern movie economy, even if - again - it's fallen subject to the now-standard blink-and-you'll-miss-it theatrical engagement before being abandoned to the Netflix algorithms. A little restless from time to time, maybe? There is, after all, only one way His Three Daughters can plausibly end; we, too, find ourselves waiting for the old fella to pass. It isn't just the limited square-footage of Jacobs' film that reminds us we could be watching off-Broadway fringe theatre: minor players (a hospice nurse, a fuckbuddy, a security guard) enter and exit stage left and right, certain conversations go round and round, and every now and again scenes resolve into monologues. Netflix in its current awards-chasing configuration has demonstrated a historical inclination for the filmed play - I'm thinking back to 2020's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom - and Daughters is in that general territory, if not exactly that. That said, Jacobs uses this stage to rejig - and re-energise - the underlying tenets of the deathbed drama. As borne out by its subtly punning title, His Three Daughters is about ownership, but it's less about ownership of a property or company, as in everything from The Cherry Orchard to TV's recent Succession, than it is about ownership of a person: how invested each daughter has been in their father, and therefore - by a process of emotional trigonometry - how they relate to one another. The results scan as much more intimate, personal and broadly touching for that: you sense the film has had to shut itself away behind closed doors and be done as an indie piece because this also shuts out the bigger business that corrupts every other walk of life and every other movie you stumble across nowadays.
The closeknit approach permits Jacobs to pull off a terrific final-act coup de théâtre - something imagined, rather than strictly naturalistic or realistic; it is, among other things, what I imagine good theatre to be like - which overturns everything the first hour sets up in our minds about the father's identity and condition. (It's assisted by a textbook supporting performance from an actor who's been around for years and never quite got the flowers he deserves.) Yet even before this flourish, I was reassured to be back in such good company, among players capable of bending Jacobs' neat writing towards stressy, ragged or zoned-out life. Lyonne arguably needs this showcase the least: she's been getting along just fine of late in superior streaming television (Russian Doll, Poker Face), yet she gets to addend a note or two of vulnerability to her range. (You spot it most clearly in her off-russet hair: not the actress's usual shade, but that of an insecure shrugger who's had a bad dye job yet can't face going back to complain.) Good on Jacobs for thinking to rescue Olsen from the banalities of the MCU: she's all nervy warmth now, and it's funny that, when driven to swear, the worst that passes the character's lips is a circumspect "dammit", the curse of someone used to holding their tongue in the presence of children. Coon, conversely, does a ruthless sketch of a businesswoman who's been sleeping on a couch, up to her eyeballs in worry, then aces the tougher assignment of making us understand and empathise with this snippy hard-ass. Jacobs still wins everybody round by talking; he's apparently trying to reclaim the centre ground independent film abandoned in recent years as its creatives went in pursuit of ever more extreme and eyecatching sights and sensations. Yet Daughters' vaguely therapeutic air came as a tonic, after suffering such a violent reaction to The Substance: this, by contrast, is what it looks like when actresses are afforded dignity and respect before the camera. More of that as we head into the autumn-winter season, and we might find ourselves on the right track again.
His Three Daughters is now streaming on Netflix.
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