How weighty is the unsaid we carry? In the Azazel Jacob-penned and directed His Three Daughters, the unsaid is so heavy as to haunt, to have one banging on doors, arguing, weeping. In a family, what is unsaid can slowly unravel a person.
Sisters Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) converge in one apartment to take care of their father, who is in ill health: in hospice care, the sisters expect their father’s death at any moment. Within close quarters and increasing tension, the sisters find they have more issues than their ill father to deal with, as anxieties, long-festering grudges about perceived slights, and bottled-up grievances bubble to the surface. We watch as the film tenderly nudges the sisters to not so much resolve their differences, but to talk at all, and thus unburden themselves of the heft of the unsaid. Jacob’s film guides these characters on a journey to learn how to breathe and shed the weight of the invisible, one word, act, and epistemically positive step at a time.
All the women deliver pitch-perfect performances: Coon’s Katie is the eldest who feels as though all responsibilities — the minutiae, formalities, and administrivia of death — fall upon her, adding to an already full plate. Olsen’s Christina is the sister with the ostensibly perfect life, but things are not as simple and easy for her as they seem. Lyonne’s Rachel is ostensibly the easy-going, irresponsible sister, who seems to not even care that her father is about to pass away. As the film unfurls each sister’s dimensions of the unsaid, which yells and thrashes to the fore, we learn that each sister gravely misunderstands and underestimates the interior trials and tribulations of the other.
Coon is spectacular and deeply resonant as the wound-too-tight eldest sister who rolls her eyes at the perceived uncaringness of Rachel, and Lyonne is delightful as the tightlipped sister who often feels it’s best and less troublesome to not stand up against Katie’s huffing onslaughts and criticisms. But it’s Olsen who steals the show for me. Christina begins the film placid as a lake — in her perceived centeredness, she expounds new-age axioms about wellbeing and processing grief. She meditates and does yoga everyday. She is always talking about how much she misses her angelic toddler back home, how sweet her life is there, and how content she is in it. But as the film goes on, cracks appear in her seemingly perfect veneer.
Olsen is spellbinding and Jacob knows this. In tight, close-up shots centering Olsen’s face, we watch in awe as she shows Christina’s inner turmoil through the slight, hardly-detectable quivering of the muscles around her eyes and lips. Christina’s pain and fear of her father passing are present in the way the skin around her eyes tightens when Katie is yelling at Rachel, in the way the corners of her lips tremble as she listens to Rachel unburden herself of the weight of quietly caring for their father while the other two sisters lived separate and apparently uncaring lives across the country. Olsen’s smile that falters stunningly reveals Christina’s lifetime of building up strength in isolation as her two sisters fought incessantly, leaving her alone to find courage and love. In such beautifully delicate ways, Olsen reveals in glimmering bursts Christina’s inner pain and turmoil, the self-doubt and loneliness she has had to battle to achieve the life that her sisters believe to be perfect.
His Three Daughters had me a weeping mess for the script’s, and the actress’, aching understanding of sisterhood, of family, and of the ways in which we refuse to really sit down and talk with those we are meant to love. The family presented in this film isn’t the kind where the members consider each other best friends; rather, it’s a family that loves in a quiet, hesitant sort of way — too much badness has taken place here, and so it’s often easier to not speak about the soreness, because it’s less work. And when you don’t speak about one thing, it becomes even easier to not speak at all.
The beauty of this film lies not in that it forces the sisters to communicate, but in the fact that it shows them that the possibility is there, that there is enough love between them that once they are strong enough, they can talk, give voice to the unsaid and thereby form a stronger bond. There is much about this film that is subtle and quiet, and I think this is the point; it’s a slice of raw, aching life, and therefore unforgettable.
