About the Dying Man

Three young women struggle with the impending death of their father in 2024's His Three Daughters. A Netflix movie, it's kind of this year's Marriage Story, starring actresses best known for big budget genre fare in a low budget character drama. It feels less ambitious than Marriage Story but it's still a perfectly decent character drama and an appreciable showcase for some of to-day's most luminous performers.

The three sisters are Katie, Rachel, and Christina, played by Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen, respectively. Katie has the A type personality and she spends most of the film fussing over a signature for the father's "Do not resuscitate" form. Rachel is another of Lyonne's hard-bitten, hard smoking, street as hell characters and Christina exploits Olsen's knack for portraying a cheery surface with anxiety bubbling underneath.

It was interesting watching this after Totem, a movie that's also about a family dealing with the impending death of a patriarch. Now that I think about it, I wonder if this was a memo somewhere; "Make media helping people cope with the death of the patriarchy." It would be a new tactic. Anyway, His Three Daughters is a more conventional film, in that it has the characters engaging in dialogue about the central problem instead of meandering through slice of life constructions. And, hey, what's wrong with a little dialogue about the topic? Ingmar Bergman did it, you can do it and still keep your artistic integrity, too.

Katie, Rachel, and Christina are types, to be sure, but the performances give them suitable nuance to keep them interesting. I like this kind of thing; characters just bouncing off each other. It's what Bergman perfected. Katie naturally despises Rachel's laid back manner but it's Rachel's same laid back manner that prevents her from poking the holes in Katie's condemnations, a task undertook by Rachel's boyfriend, Benjy (Jovan Adepo), who appears briefly to set things straight. Those comparing Totem and His Three Daughters as examples of how men and women make art about the same subject would be justified in pointing out that His Three Daughters hints that women need men to save them (His Three Daughters was written and directed by a man named Azazel Jacobs). On the other hand, Totem presents the ailing patriarch as something like a pet being cared for peripherally and we get no sense of his death threatening to have a dire impact on the family.

All in all, His Three Daughters is a solid, oddly cosy experience. It's on Netflix.