‘His Three Daughters’ Review: Sisters at Odds Together

Every so often in the heart-heavy drama “His Three Daughters,” the filmmaker Azazel Jacobs frames the actress Natasha Lyonne in radiant close-up. Her character, Rachel, is one of the daughters of the title, and while she thrums with palpable energy, she also has a quality of stillness about her. When Rachel stares into the distance, as she tends to do, lost in thought or maybe just lost — her huge eyes shining, her face edged by flaming red hair — she brings to mind a hummingbird hovering in midair, its wings beating impossibly fast against the strongest headwind.

Rachel is the youngest of the sisters who’ve convened to care for their father, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), at the end of his life. With her older siblings Katie (Carrie Coon) and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), Rachel drifts through the New York apartment where their father is fading away, his heartbeat now supplanted by the beeping machinery that he’s hooked up to, which creates an eerie rhythm throughout. It’s a hard, painful setup but also absurdly funny, intimate and human. Jacobs is sensitive to life’s contradictions; he knows how abruptly love seems to boil over into hate, and how quickly adult siblings can turn into whining, raging children.

Set over an inexact number of days and nights, the movie tracks the sisters during the course of their vigil. Katie is the scold (and surrogate angry patriarch), who also lives in the city, while Christina (an anxious maternal type from California) plays the part of the diplomat. Outwardly, at least, Rachel — who lives with their father in the apartment — slips readily into the role of the black sheep (and unruly child), especially given her pursuits and pastimes. When she’s not fleeing from her sisters, Rachel is hunkered down in her room, watching sports on TV, playing the odds and taking hits off a blunt. Rachel seems to be in a fog, but she’s perfectly lucid.

Most of the movie takes place in the apartment, a modest, pointedly ordinary space with plenty of windows and a couple of bedrooms on the upper floor of a building in a large complex. It’s humble by mainstream, art-directed movie standards; it looks like a real apartment where real people live. There’s nothing fancy about it, just photos, tchotchkes and furniture people might actually use, middle-class people, working-class people, people lucky enough to have an affordable New York (Manhattan!) apartment. It’s a moving emblem of a nearly lost city and, by turns, a haunted house, a cozy home and a theater for the family’s drama, one that the sisters enact at times while reciting grievances they clearly committed to heart long ago.

Emotions are already raw when the movie opens on Katie. Seated against a white wall, arms tightly folded across her chest, she is in the midst of an epic tirade directed at an offscreen, silent Rachel. As the camera holds on Katie, she talks and talks, her words running together into a near-indistinguishable slurry. It’s as if she didn’t believe in punctuation or the niceties of conversation; it soon becomes clear she has next to no patience for Rachel. Katie asks her a question without waiting for the answer, emphasizes the obvious, makes demands. It’s not for nothing that the first time you see each sister she is alone in the frame.

As the vigil continues, things shift and settle, and other characters come and go, including a hospice worker, Angel (Rudy Galvan); a security guard, Victor (Jose Febus); and Rachel’s friend, Benjy (Jovan Adepo). Each brings some air into the fraught scene; more subtly, they reveal something about how the sisters relate to the larger world. Katie, for one, jokingly refers to the hospice aide as an Angel of Death, which isn’t funny the first or the second time she does so. That Rachel talks more readily to Victor than to her sisters says much about the family — about the siblings’ relations, worldviews and aching need for connection — as does the moment when, in her bedroom, she wearily rests her head on Benjy’s shoulder.