Exploring caregiving and complexity in 'His Three Daughters' on Netflix
Netflix, Azazel Jacobs' His Three Daughters — a superbly performed chamber drama about three women looking after their dying father — a narrative shift occurs. I won't give away anything important. It's enough to say that after an hour of storytelling centred on the daughters, who are negotiating their own complicated interrelationships and personal histories, we meet the father for the first time. Before this, he has been a barely glimpsed, immobile presence on a bed in a room. Now, as they wheel him, he is only half-conscious, only just capable of posing — mechanically, through pain and discomfort — for a selfie. But he is at least recognisable as a person.
And then something else happens that shifts the needle from caregivers to the patient — to his inner life and dazed thoughts, which may have nothing to do with his daughters' concerns.
This is one of those risky, tone-altering devices that can take a viewer out of a film. But it fits a theme that emerged a short while earlier: the unknowability of people, or how a person's entirety can (perhaps) only be processed through his absence — as opposed to the many disconnected bits you experience at different times while he is alive. Shortly after we see the three daughters trying to find the right words for an obituary, the father stops being an abstraction for us and becomes real. We even get a hint of something about him that the protagonists didn't know.
In an online session some years ago, a friend and I discussed how illness-centred films are often more about
