The new Netflix film, His Three Daughters, is an intimate exploration of how to approach grief and death, as well as how to reconcile tense familial relationships.
The film is written and directed by Azazel Jacobs and is led by Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne. The film also stars Rudy Galvan, Jose Febus and Jasmine Bracey, with Jay O. Sanders and Jovan Adepo.
What is His Three Daughters about?
The film centers on “an elderly patriarch and the three grown daughters who come to be with him in his final days.” The three sisters– Katie (Coon), Christina (Olsen) and Rachel (Lyonne) are extremely different from each other in many ways.
As Netflix’s official synopsis of the film states:
Katie (Coon) is a controlling Brooklyn mother dealing with a wayward teenage daughter; free-spirited Christina (Olsen) is a different kind of mom, separated from her offspring for the first time; and Rachel (Lyonne) is a sports-betting stoner who has never left her father’s apartment — much to the chagrin of her stepsisters, who share a different mother and worldview. Continuing his astute exploration of family dynamics in close-knit spaces, Jacobs follows the siblings over the course of three volatile days, as death looms, grievances erupt, and love seeps through the cracks of a fractured home.
What happens in His Three Daughters and what are the relationships between the sisters?
His Three Daughters sees both Katie and Christina arrive in town as hospice has been called in for their father, Vincent, at the residence where he stays with Rachel. Katie and Christina are basically estranged from Rachel, despite the fact that Katie also lives in New York City. She only visits her father every once in a while. Katie and Christina go back and forth over the latter smoking weed (though Rachel says Vincent never minded) and the food that is kept in the fridge, including bags of apples. Rachel also hasn’t been able to get Vincent to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order, which is another point of contention, as is the fact that Katie believes Rachel wants to usurp their father’s apartment once he dies and is waiting for that. As he is dying, Rachel also does not want to go into the room.
Rachel’s boyfriend Benjy (played by Adepo) takes Katie and Christina to task for the way they have been treating Rachel, noting how she has been the only one taking care of their father all of this time. He specifically has a lot of smoke for Katie, since she’s been living in the city this whole time while Rachel was the primary caretaker. This triggers a big fight between the sisters, and even exposes a rift between Katie and Christina. Katie tries to patch things up with the sisters, and things come to a head when the topic comes up about Rachel not being as much of Vincent’s daughter as the other two. She responds to the fact that he raised her and is the only father she’s known.
After this, the sisters begin to truly start to move forward as they bond over hospice’s warnings of when their father will die and work on the obituary together. The daughters all go to Vincent’s room for the first time together, and having a lucid moment, Vincent asks them to take him to his favorite chair in the living room before he passes away.
Is one of the final scenes in His Three Daughters a dream?
One of the final scenes is a dream sequence. When the daughters bring Vincent to his chair, we see that he rips off the oxygen and tubes and begins walking around the room and reminiscences on his relationships with them, their relationships with each other, and his fondness for New York City. However, he looks at the chair and then realizes that he is in fact dead, and apparently passed away at some point after they sat him down in the chair.
How does His Three Daughters end?
His Three Daughters ends with the three daughters hugging and holding each other after each sitting in their father’s chair. They all say goodbye to each other and sing “Five Little Ducks,” seemingly being on a path to becoming closer like their father wanted.
Do the sisters speak in His Three Daughters speak pig latin?
Yes, there is a point in the movie where Katie and Christina speak pig latin to each other. Pig latin is very commonly used by kids, and as Dictionary.com reported, “a language game that children (and some adults) use to speak ‘in code.’ Pig Latin words are formed by altering words in English.”
On the moment, Jacobs told IndieWire, “I didn’t speak it as a kid, and I just looked up different pig Latin languages, so I typed in the pig Latin — I don’t know if it’s that, it’s like a childish gibberish — that seemed like the simplest way of communicating. It was something I’d seen with siblings before but not something I ever had. I wrote it out phonetically and I remember getting a call from both Lizzie and Carrie saying, ‘So how is this actually said?’ I only wrote. I didn’t know how it was said … I let them know, I just wrote it, and I hope you’ll figure it out, and they did, and by the time they showed up, they could both do it very quickly. It was the first time I was hearing what that would sound like out of my mind, an instinct they used and embraced and stuck with.”
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