His Three Daughters: Natasha Lyonne is a breath of fresh air in this draining palliative care drama

To hail the acting in His Three Daughters as “accomplished” and “raw” is to miss that it’s actually the inverse. Most of the cast feel stuck on a stage, doing the modern equivalent of cut-rate Chekhov. They could have picked a much stronger text for their exertions.

This morose, drainingly heavy-handed chamber drama is 90 per cent confined to a New York apartment where an old man, Vincent, is dying behind closed doors, bleeping out his last on an EKG. We don’t see him – until very late in the game, anyhow – because the script by writer-director Azazel Jacobs (The Lovers; French Exit) is preoccupied with the in-fighting of his near and dear. 

Eldest of his daughters is a layabout named Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), to whom Vincent is technically a stepdad. She’s the only one who stayed put to look after him, with a stoner’s approach to palliation, but things just got worse.

And so, her two far-flung younger sisters, Katie (Carrie Coon) and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), have lately arrived to set things in order, hire carers, and get stressed about Vincent’s clear demand to not be resuscitated when the time comes.

Katie is hugely uptight, frustrated and passive-aggressive, all of which we grasp in Coon’s opening monologue. She and Olsen, as a young mother who’s away with the fairies, take turns to do speeches, which resolutely remain speeches: they’re solo in the frame for minutes at a time, trying out an array of bespoke hand gestures.

Some evidence would be welcomed that the other actors showed up, even just to listen – they certainly don’t get to interject. Only the camera is attuned, transfixed, as if no one else dare move a muscle.

This scenario is a crude baton Jacobs has fashioned and passed around between his cast. You can’t heavily blame the actors: given the nondescript bleating of these characters, it’s hard to imagine how much more spark, still less feeling, could be mined from his dramaturgy. 

And yet Lyonne proves that it’s possible. She starts out benumbed and reticent, as if Rachel is rebelling against all this verbal diarrhoea. But when she does get speeches, she smuggles them in, cracks them apart with her raspy verve, and it’s a breath of fresh air.

As a turn, this amounts to Lyonne Doing Lyonne. But at least we understand this refusenik on some gut level, and why she’s barely interested in relationships with the other two. From our point of view, they’re performances, not people.

15 cert, 105 min; in cinemas now and on Netflix from Friday September 20