M, 105 minutes

4 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

However hard they try, three adult sisters who spend time together caring for their father during the last days of his life discover that getting on with each other is no easy matter. Despite their shared paternity and their blended family history, having to put up with each other at such a time of grief and loss is a tough call.

This tightly wound, intimate family drama delivers wonderful performances from its three leads, Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne as the trio of siblings who don’t seem to share much besides their dad. As the tensions grow and the alliances fluctuate, it’s clear that writer-director Azazel Jacobs is a keen and witty observer of the nuance and complexity of human relationships.

The nub of it all is the strained relations between these three young women who are family, but so very different. There are incidental characters like the two palliative care professionals who visit to oversee the caregivers, and a friendly security guard who chats to Rachel as she sits on a bench outside her apartment block to smoke a joint, but the film is a three-hander.

Although set in quiet, still interiors in front of a camera that barely moves, the ongoing vitality of the Bronx never feels far away. In domestic spaces, this family drama is also a tribute to the city where it is located, New York, where the whine of sirens and the clatter of nearby subway trains is never far away.

Nuance and complexity wittily observed

The eldest sister Katie (Coon) is the first to appear on screen. Her opening monologue is a dead giveaway, and an amusing one at that, to her uptight and controlling nature. She is the complete opposite of Rachel (Lyonne), a gentle, non-committal type, without partner, children or job, who is addicted to weed and to internet gambling on sports. How could these two be sisters?

Sweet Christina (Olsen) is much younger than her siblings. She is a mum missing the six-year-old daughter back home. She has left the city and lives thousands of miles away across the country. Perhaps this distance has shielded her from her father’s decline, made his palliative care confronting, and accounts for her being the one still struggling with her emotions. Vincent (Jay O Sanders as their father) has cancer.

As they take turns watching over him during a three-day period, it becomes clear that the women have been estranged for a long time. There were two marriages, one which saw the birth of Katie and Christina, and a second to a woman who already had a daughter, Rachel.

When Katie takes the lead and starts writing an obituary, no one can agree on anything much about their dad, except that he married a couple of crazy bitches, and then produced three more. Crazy bitches the lot of them.

He married a couple of crazy bitches, then produced three more

All the while, Vincent is off-screen, only glimpsed through the half-open doorway to the bedroom where he lies hooked up to a vital signs monitor. His absence teases us as we wonder what kind of man he is, or was. Curious, we want to meet him. When and how will that happen?

You may try, like me, to build his personality profile by listening to what the sisters have to say about him, or by studying the details in his apartment. This is a ruse. It is hard to infer much from an ordinary, everyday apartment, and the women don’t agree on anything.

That’s not to say that Vincent remains forever a mystery. It’s not like that, and the moment he appears is a cheering and unsentimental moment of togetherness that took me by surprise. It wasn’t an easy scene to pull off.

It seems not to matter all that much what he was like. This is, after all, the story of the daughters he is leaving behind, and how his death repairs and restores their sibling relationships.

There have been some excellent recent films, like The Father and One Fine Morning, with adult children coping with the demise of a parent. They were serious and intense with barely a flicker of humour, while this New York story suggests that laughter can go a long way in difficult times too.

First published in the Canberra Times on 7 September 2024. Jane’s reviews are also published on Rotten Tomatoes