His Three Daughters Parent Guide

It’s been a long time since Rachel (Natasha Lyon) spent time with her sisters, but this isn’t exactly a family reunion. Their father, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders) is dying, and Katie (Carrie Coon) and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) are here until the end.

Vincent is barely conscious and rarely coherent, and his hospice worker Angel (Ruday Galvan) tells the sisters that he has only a few days left. And while Rachel, Katie, and Christina have agreed to try to get along for their fathers’ sake, the building pressure between them soon exposes some major cracks in their relationships with one another – cracks they may not have time to fix before Vincent passes. The women are so different; it’s tempting to try to muscle through the next few days and then go their separate ways…

Despite its somewhat bleak subject matter, His Three Daughters is presented with so much compassion that it’s hard not to enjoy the warmth and humor that underlies the tragedy of the story. The relationship between the sisters isn’t quite as bad as Lear’s daughters, but it’s close. (This isn’t Shakespeare, so there’s no plotting or maiming, thankfully.) In spite of that, the movie is frequently funny, which makes the raw grief much more survivable for the audience.

The film feels like a stage play, both in script and presentation, with minimal background music and a setting restricted almost entirely to one cramped New York apartment. The similarly limited cast means the movie has a lot of time to spend exploring a few characters in some depth, and it’s that sympathetic character study that carries the movie – along with some phenomenal performances from all the leads.

His Three Daughters is not a great movie for younger kids, thanks to the difficult subject matter, slow pacing, and frequent profanity. There’s also nearly constant substance use (alcohol or marijuana) throughout the film. Adult audiences, however, will find a lot to think about between the credits on this one, which is rumored to be Oscar bait and is easily one of the strongest releases I’ve seen from Netflix. If you’re lucky, you’ll break even: It might make you laugh just as often as it makes you cry.