The Netflix film has one of the best endings in years.

It would be excessive to call His three daughters, Written and directed by Azazel Jacobs (French exit), a modern reinterpretation of King Lear. Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), the dying father whose impending disappearance is the subject of the film, is anything but a powerful monarch: he spent his career as a mid-level official in the New York City government and lives in a rented apartment in one of Manhattan’s middle-class apartment blocks. But for the three women who have gathered in this apartment to accompany Vincent in the final phase of his hospice care, his modest, cluttered apartment represents a kind of kingdom, the only place where they can still gather and remember their childhood. The battle that is waged between the daughters over the course of the story is not LearnIt is not a warlike struggle for the succession to the throne, but an attempt to reconcile the memories of the children they were with the adults they are today.

The three daughters have two different mothers, a fact that becomes increasingly important as the film progresses: the eldest, Katie (Carrie Coon), and the youngest, Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), have the same mother, while the middle one, Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), only became part of the family after Vincent remarried after the death of his first wife. Rachel’s mother has since died as well, and in adulthood the siblings have grown apart. Katie lives a subway ride away in Brooklyn, but rarely visits; she is busy with her rebellious teenage daughter and, judging by her nervous temper and sometimes bossy demeanor, has a stressful but prestigious job. Christina lives in an unnamed state far from New York, with a loving husband and a toddler whom she sometimes spoils snarkily; she is a sort of hippie who does yoga daily and once accompanied the Grateful Dead on tour. Of the three, Rachel has long been closest to her father, both emotionally and physically: even before he became ill, she shared the family apartment with him, like a roommate. Rachel doesn’t have a job, but earns some money by betting on several sporting events every day. She also smokes weed, many Weed and freely admitted to her sisters that she is a wake-and-bake stoner who starts every day with a strong blunt.

It’s not clear how long Vincent has been ill with cancer, but at the beginning of the film he has stopped eating and is only intermittently conscious. Two hospice staff take turns to help with care during the day, so the nurses’ primary role is to make occasional visits to their father’s bedside while they wait for him to die in adjoining rooms. This leaves the three women with many hours a day and night in which they argue about everything from cooking and washing up to Rachel’s ever-present marijuana smoke to how to properly word the obituary Katie is trying to write for her father.

Most of all, the sisters complain about their own strained interpersonal dynamics, some of which have developed over decades: Katie’s bossiness as the eldest child can make the other two feel more like her employees than siblings, Christina’s quiet air of self-control can come across as smug perfectionism, or Rachel, a stepsister whose arrival into the family long ago upset the established order, was always subtly made to feel less Vincent’s daughter than her sisters, even though she was the one who cared for him in his final years. All three have legitimate grievances to air, but they can’t even broach those issues without one or more of them crying, storming out of the room, or, in the case of Katie and Rachel, getting into an argument involving physical shoving while their little sister, who was trying to make peace, stands in the middle and screams, “You’re both assholes!” Although the daughters are structurally similar to Lear’s, there is no greedy Regan or Goneril among them. They are all Cordelias in their own way, guardians of their own private love for their father, convinced that only they know how to care for him in his final moments as he needs.

His three daughterscurrently in theaters before hitting Netflix on Friday, is a drama set almost entirely in a single location. Aside from a handful of scenes in the complex’s courtyard and a sequence in which Lyonne’s Rachel heads out into the street to buy fresh smoking paraphernalia and greet a neighbor’s dog, the complicated and often painful story of an entire family’s life plays out in a few cramped rooms while the machine measuring Vincent’s vital signs beeps incessantly from his otherwise silent bedroom. Such a claustrophobic setting could easily have made the film feel like a filmed play, and the first hour feels stiffly theatrical in places as we gradually learn the sisters’ backstories through their encounters with each other and with a caring caregiver named Angel (Randy Ramos, Jr.).

Nevertheless, cinematographer Sam Levy, with his skillful camera, succeeds in giving the confined space of this apartment a specific emotional topography, a land with its forbidden zones (Vincent’s bedroom, which the grieving Rachel has difficulty entering), contested spaces (the kitchen and dining room, which are frequently taken over by the control freak Katie) and ambivalently received guests. Rachel’s boyfriend, played by a never better Jovan Adepo (Babylon, 3 Body problem), rebukes Katie with biting honesty as she tries to treat him as an intruder in the house where, he points out, he has probably eaten more family meals than she has in recent years. The racial, sexual and class undertones of this tense confrontation are as densely packed as a box of dynamite, but Jacobs’ script leaves those tensions unresolved. He is less interested in who is right in any given encounter than in how the stubborn insistence on Be can prevent well-intentioned people from listening to the words of those directly opposite them.

I have tried not to spoil what there is to spoil in a film whose ending is as inevitable as the fate of a terminally ill person. But I will say – with as much clarity as I can muster through the tears that are once again blurring my vision – that the last 15 minutes or so of His three daughters are what elevate the film from “an impressively finely tuned family drama featuring three superb actresses” to the stratosphere of “a transcendent work of art” whose insights into the meaning of human mortality may make you want to change your life to be worthy of it. You’ll note that the first actor mentioned in this review, Jay O. Sanders, has not yet appeared again. That’s because Sanders only has one actual scene, but man, what a scene it is: a masterful monologue delivered with tremendous humanity and tenderness, culminating in a devastating perspective shift that the director handles with such sensitivity that you’ll have to replay it in your head on the way home to understand exactly what happened.

Sanders, an actor of actors who has appeared in many films and on television, but is perhaps best known for his work in the theatre (I saw him in a staged reading of Henry set a few years ago, plays an unforgettably vulnerable Falstaff), manages the improbable feat of practically stealing the film’s ending from the three extraordinary actors with whom we have spent the last two hours. But of course, “stealing” is a concept that is difficult to grasp in the context of such a generous ensemble collaboration as His three daughters. Vincent’s late emergence from his beeping hiding place does not change the deep-rooted conflicts that his quarrelsome offspring are waging. On the contrary, his sudden appearance gives them and the audience a gift that neither they nor we could have foreseen. The final moments of the film shimmer with the mystery that this last encounter with the father has left behind. The Learn The comparison may not always hold true – there are no murderous sisters or madmen roaming cursed moorlands – but a line Lear says to Cordelia near the end of the play captures something of the mutual, if temporary, grace that these three sisters and a father eventually find: “If thou askest my blessing, I will kneel down / And ask thee Forgiveness.”