Three sisters, one cramped New York apartment, and a father in the bedroom who is not going to recover. Azazel Jacobs builds His Three Daughters on that and nothing more, and it holds. Katie (Carrie Coon), Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) have been estranged for years. Now they share a few rooms while Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), dying of cancer, spends his last days in home hospice care.

It starts small, with a fight about weed. Katie, who lives in Brooklyn and has rarely pitched in, makes Rachel smoke outside as a mark of respect for the family. Rachel, who stayed with Vincent through his illness, insists he never minded. Then Katie opens the fridge, finds three bags of apples and nothing else, and takes it as proof of neglect. The scene is funny and a little cruel. From here on, every squabble, whether it is the food or the Do Not Resuscitate order Rachel never got Vincent to sign while he was still lucid, turns out to be the same quarrel about who has the right to grieve him.

Underneath it sits Rachel’s place in the family. She is Vincent’s stepdaughter, not his blood daughter, and when he dies she becomes the leaseholder of the rent-controlled apartment. Katie says aloud what she suspects: that Rachel is just waiting for him to die so she can keep the place. Lyonne plays the accusation without a flicker of self-pity. Her Rachel is guarded and prickly, absorbed in her sports bets, unable to make herself walk into the room where her stepfather lies unconscious. Coon, for her part, lets Katie’s bossiness show up as fear. This is the sister who is stuck trying to write the obituary and cannot find the first line.

Olsen has the thankless job of peacemaker, and she does it well. Christina keeps stepping between the other two until she can’t. When she finally screams that she hates them both, it lands hard, because we have watched her try to keep the peace for so long.

The best scene belongs to someone else. Benji (Jovan Adepo), Rachel’s boyfriend, has watched the sisters treat her badly, and against her wishes he tells them so. For most of Vincent’s decline, he says, Rachel was the only one taking care of him. When Vincent would eat nothing but apples, she was the one cutting them. Benji adds that he was Vincent’s friend, and that he did meet Katie the last time she visited, which he puts at a few months back, even though she had called him a stranger. Adepo plays it with a quiet, controlled anger, and the whole room shifts.

Jacobs, whose 2008 Momma’s Man already had an ear for the awkward warmth of family life, keeps the story in the apartment and trusts his actors to fill it. The space is small and the film never pretends otherwise. Angel (Rudy Galvan), the hospice worker, keeps predicting the end and keeps getting it wrong, which gives Katie and Rachel something absurd to laugh about together. It is the nearest thing to a truce the film offers. His Three Daughters premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023, opened in select US theaters in September 2024 and reached Netflix two weeks later. The National Board of Review named it one of the year’s ten best independent films, and the cast and Jacobs shared the Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award, a prize that goes to an ensemble rather than to any single performer.

Not everything works. The humor is sometimes too sharp for the mood, and a few of the sisters’ arguments circle back over ground we have already covered. Rachel’s betting is a good character detail, but now and then it pulls our attention away from the bedside.

Still, the ending earns itself by refusing to tidy anything up. Katie apologizes to Rachel, but only for being wrong about the apples. Rachel says she stayed for Vincent and will move out once he is gone. Then Katie suggests that Rachel is somehow less his daughter, and Rachel answers, in tears, that he was the only father she ever had. It settles nothing about the lease or the years of distance. It is simply the first thing anyone in that apartment says that cannot be argued with.