In His Three Daughters, starring Elizabeth Olsen, Natasha Lyonne and Carrie Coon (now on Netflix), filmmaker Azazel Jacobs replicates one of the oddest sensations that happens when losing a loved one, and caring for them in their final days. Aside from the emotional toll it takes, time either feels like it’s passing incredibly quickly, or dragging, where mere minutes can feel like hours.
While it’s something that’s particularly unique and hard to really explain, Jacobs impressively expresses that feeling in this film, something we never really get to experience in films, at least not in a way that’s effective. But for Jacobs, he highlighted that was exactly the stimulus for this movie he wrote and directed.
“That was base. How could time be moving this way? … I definitely felt like I hadn’t discussed it much with friends, but suddenly it was really moving in a way that I had nothing else to compare it to,” Jacobs told Yahoo Canada. “Certain things felt very truncated and some things felt elongated in this way that, it was odd.”
“Also the shift of going from dreading something to suddenly knowing, accepting something’s going to happen, and then waiting for it to happen. That was a real weird thing. … Your life is on hold at a certain point and you need it to happen so that these other things that you’ve been completely not thinking about are suddenly starting to seep in. The emails, the phone calls, the ability to disappear suddenly starts running out and I was desperate. … I felt like me representing it would give me some sense of understanding it that would equal, in my mind at least, some form of control as well.”
In His Three Daughters three sisters, Katie (Coon), Christina (Olsen) and Rachel (Lyonne), have come together to their dying father’s New York City apartment to be with him in his finals days.
These three sisters have largely lived separate adult lives. Katie is mom who lives in Brooklyn, trying manage parenting a teenage daughter, and she can’t believe no one got their father to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order, as she previously requested. Christina is also a mother to a younger daughter, and a Dead Head with generally a more zen approach to life. While spending the most time in her father’s room, this is also her first trip away from her child. Rachel has been living in her father’s apartment, spending her days smoking pot and betting on sports. Katie, in particular, is not really a fan of Rachel’s lifestyle.
In a particularly impactful start to the film, the first scene is a simply set shot of Katie in front of a beige wall, with Coon delivering a long monologue where Katie is expressing how she wants their father’s passing to be as painless as possible and how the sister have to handle the situation “like adults.” Then we see Katie’s sisters, all three of them are sitting at a table together, and their discussion continues.
“It was the first image that I had. It’s the first thing that I wrote. It’s the first thing that we shot,” Jacobs said. “I love this idea of a person presenting themselves the way that they feel like they should be, and coming in with so much force.”
“I wanted to really start with somebody swinging with everything that they had just coming straight out. … Forget about opening titles and dealing with the kind of a soft ease into this, I wanted this to feel as immediate as this experience in real life has felt. It felt like it was an exciting opening of a type of film that I would be into watching.”
Coon highlighted that this film is particularly “theatrical,” and its dialogue and very detailed structure is what makes His Three Daughters particularly interesting.
“We’re not accustomed to seeing films that are this language forward, but I think there’s an appetite for them,” Coon said. “I think that’s what the movie’s success is proving.”
“What I love about the structure of that beginning is that it’s all very specific. There’s nothing arbitrary about the way the film is shot and I think ultimately what happens is the audience feels, they don’t know they’re feeling it, but they’re feeling the confidence of the filmmaker. And I think that’s actually really reassuring and it allows them just to kind of settle into experiencing the film, because it’s so carefully wrought, and it’s so specifically written. I mean, it was intimidating to kick it off with a very long monologue, but the nice thing about it is that it was also very specifically punctuated, and Aza knew exactly how he wanted it to be, and as soon as he got when he needed, you would move on to the next thing.”
With His Three Daughters largely just filmed within this apartment, there’s a certain level of constraint where none of these actors can really hide or have a distraction. Now Coon, Lyonne and Olsen are all such phenomenal actors, they certainly don’t need anywhere to hide in a performance, but all the really specific visual choices in this confined space showcases a beautiful intimacy for each character.
“If there’s one thing that I love most in this world it’s restrictions,” Olsen said. “I love rules and I believe that creativity is fierce and energized with restrictions.”
“That’s why I always want to be like, ‘How small can we make this thing?’ Because I do believe that there are certain films and projects that require more things in order to tell the best version of that story, and this is a project that really benefited from us stripping it all back.”
“I come at it in such a different way, which is the discipline,” Lyonne added. “I really need those boundaries in real life. I need to know logistics and time, such that I can feel safe to kind of go crazy within it.”
“I want it to be lawless anarchy, but within a very clear framework that has boundaries to it. Otherwise, it’s just not for me. It feels too loose.”
With such a uniquely vulnerable story, tapping into emotions that are particularly hard to express, with performances from actors who fully embody their characters and the complex relationship between them, His Three Daughters is easily among our favourite dramas of the year.
