LONDON: Viewers beware: the first two thirds of Netflix’s “His Three Daughters” is a Very Serious Film full of Very Serious Acting from a trio of Very Gifted Actors.
This tense, claustrophobic family drama tells the story of Katie, Christina and Rachel — played by Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne, respectively — who return to the family home to look after their ailing father during his last days, butting heads on everything from groceries to life choices.
And writer-director Azazel Jacobs wants us all to know just how Very Serious it all is — so he has his cast speak and move like very accomplished thespians straight out of a critically lauded stage play.
So we learn all about the three women and their relationships with each other, and their father, from wildly gesticulated one-sided phone conversations, impassioned exposition dumps, and spectacularly articulate jibes they launch at one another.
“His Three Daughters” is on Netflix. (Supplied)
But it is the last third of the movie, when the three women must deal with the inevitable, that this goes from being a Very Serious Film to an actually great one.
Coon, Olsen and Lyonne all lean into the slightly caricatured roles they have established thus far, and all of a sudden, “His Three Daughters” becomes a sweet, heartbreaking, bitterly acerbic and wonderfully nuanced examination of an ever-shifting family dynamic that is more layered and relatable than the first hour of runtime ever hinted at.
Coon and Olsen make for good extremist foils — they sit at differing ends of the sister spectrum, one serious and efficient, the other laidback and irritatingly holistic.
But it is Lyonne’s Rachel who really makes the final act sing, bursting with approachable spikiness and disarming wit, all while visibly trying to keep it together while her world falls apart.
Jacobs has opted to shoot the movie on film, in a real location, both of which give “His Three Daughters” a visceral, lived-in feel that only adds to that sense of claustrophobic, sinking dread that their father’s life is coming to an end.
Forgive this movie its overwrought first hour and settle in for a final act that is as good as anything else that has been released this year.
