This is the End: HIS THREE DAUGHTERS

The only way art can accurately portray death is through absence. So says one of the daughters in His Three Daughters, a movie about estranged sisters gathered in the small New York City apartment in which their father is dying. True to its word, he stays in the next room, with only the sound of a heart monitor softly beeping in the background to alert us to his continued presence. Meanwhile the action of the film takes place almost entirely with him off screen. It creates a sense of impending absence looming over the picture. We spend our time in the rest of the apartment with three grown women who aren’t particularly close in their sibling relationships. We get the sense that maybe they were never all that close. Here are sisters who’ve found themselves at very different places in life, living distant lives connected only by the man who raised them, gave them a shared history, and now in his expiring has them back for another time together—the last with him, and maybe the last for the three of them together, too. The trio of performances are a fine-tuned chamber piece of natural discomforts and duty. There’s the frosty older sister (Carrie Coon) who talks about her own distant daughters. There’s the pothead middle sister (Natasha Lyonne) who lives with the old man, took care of him on her own for years, and is now suddenly sidelined by the others. There’s the younger sister (Elizabeth Olsen), with a 3-year-old daughter back home. They sit awkwardly together, tiptoe across a lifetime of conversational land mines, take breaks for solitary phone calls and smokes, reconnect even as they feel bound to sit and wait for a conclusion.

They take turns sitting at their father’s bedside. Hospice nurses come in and out, each time reporting that this looks like the end. When called out for their repetitive negative prognostications, one admits: it’s always been the end. The movie gets the atmosphere of suspended suspense of a deathbed vigil—the tense import weighing down on even the most quotidian of exchanges as all involved wait in the long caesura of activity of an old body slowly shutting down. They wait for…what, exactly? A moment of clarity? A last goodbye? A release? A relief? It brings the sisters together, and finds ways to put stress on all the fragile points of past fractures and current contention in their family bonds. And it brings a fluttering sense of togetherness—unity in disunity, hopeful fresh starts even as their last fixed point of familial obligation is slipping away. Writer-director-editor Azazel Jacobs is always good at tracking the subtle shifts of mood and perspective in intimate character studies. In modest, perceptive dramas with warm, natural comedy and deep reservoirs of melancholy, he draws portraits of sensitive high schoolers (Terri) and middle-aged divorced couples (The Lovers) and rich-blooded eccentrics (French Exit). His latest, shot with warm interior lights against a grainy, autumnal glow, is another in that strong tradition. It's a sad, small, dialogue-driven movie that sometimes risks the obvious, only to speak so directly to a strong, true set of emotions that it finds quiet, heart-rending moments of transcendence. It feels like we really come to know these women—and their father—in this last moment they have together.