Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.At your next family reunion, set a stopwatch. That way, you can pin down to the second how soon all parties are caught up in the same old brooding and bickering. All of the above are much to the fore in His Three Daughters, a sweet-and-sour comic drama that wonders what adult siblings might share beside genes and grudges. The scene is a modest Manhattan apartment, verging on the cramped. Almost every scene will take place in small rooms peopled as per the title by sisters: Katie (Carrie Coon), brittle; Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), spacey; Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), stoned. Here too is the reason they have reassembled in the place where they grew up. Their father Vincent is now in the last stages of dying, unseen behind a bedroom door. Let’s make this all as painless as possible, the sisters agree. “This” could clearly mean many things.The set-up is so confined, you assume the movie must have started as a play. In fact, the script is an original, written by director Azazel Jacobs. And the apartment is less a stage than a waiting room. The chronically over-organised Katie gives voice to the question on everyone’s mind. How long will it take?That cosmic uncertainty gently reshapes what we might expect from a starry American movie about loss. Spikes of laughter or anticipatory grief arrive a fraction off the usual beat. So much, we realise, is out of our hands. Do we have time to run to the store?Childhood homes loom large for Jacobs. His 2008 breakthrough Momma’s Man saw a panicked new father take refuge in his bohemian parents’ New York apartment. The warm and low-key His Three Daughters is also keenly observant about sibling squabbles, the nature of responsibility and how past and present coexist in families.The movie duly gives each daughter a moment in the spotlight, and the chance to bend away from our first impressions. Like many parents, Jacobs can’t quite resist having a favourite. Here, Rachel is brought to bright, rasping life by Lyonne, but also given an inch more attention and a biographical note that redirects the whole story. And yet that lands less as a scripted whammy than the kind of detail reality often produces, at once surprising and suddenly self-evident. The moment is a neat fit for a film about death in a poky apartment that turns out to brim with light and life.★★★★☆In UK and US cinemas now and on Netflix from September 20
