Film

Daughters

Name: Daughters
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2022

Drama
Slow-burning

A decade-long documentary following three daughters as they grieve their mother's suicide and rebuild their lives. It's achingly honest without sentiment—a film about survival, sisterhood, and the patient work of healing. For anyone who's lost someone, or wants to understand what that actually means.

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The Act of Killing2012

A documentary that sits with perpetrators of violence to understand how trauma transforms people. Like Daughters, it refuses easy answers and finds humanity in unbearable circumstances.

But It's methodical and slow, and the subject matter—genocide and murder—is far darker than most people expect from a documentary.

Hoop Dreams1994

Follows two boys over 15 years as their lives unfold unpredictably. It has Daughters' patience with time and its refusal to impose a narrative arc on real life.

But It's three hours long and mostly about basketball, which will bore you if the sport itself doesn't matter to you.

My Octopus Teacher2020

A man grieves his life by forming a relationship with an octopus. Like Daughters, it's about how we learn to live after loss, told with tenderness and specificity.

But The sentimentality is deliberate and front-and-center, which lands for some people and feels saccharine to others.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Daughters

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Shirley2020

Both excavate the internal experience of trauma. Daughters watches what happens after; Shirley watches it happening, but both demand you sit with discomfort rather than resolve it.

A psychological thriller in which Elisabeth Moss plays the writer Shirley Jackson, isolated and struggling while her husband gaslights her. It's a dark inversion of loss—not aftermath, but the slow erasure of self happening in real time.

But It's bleak and claustrophobic, with a horror-film atmosphere that some will find punishing rather than illuminating.

The Farewell2019

A family decides not to tell their grandmother she's dying. It explores grief, cultural difference, and what we owe each other with both humor and devastating accuracy.

But It's a narrative film, not a documentary, and some viewers feel the comedy undercuts the emotional stakes.

Boyhood2014

Filmed over twelve years with the same actors, it watches a boy grow up in real time. The effect is hypnotic—you feel time the way Daughters makes you feel grief.

But Nothing dramatic happens, which is the point, but if you need plot momentum you will find it tedious.

Free Solo2018

A climber prepares to scale a 3,000-foot cliff without ropes. It's about risk and love and the people who watch us, made with extraordinary visual beauty.

But The suspense can feel manufactured, and some people resent the filmmakers for capturing the climb rather than looking away.

The Truffle Hunters2020

An intimate portrait of aging truffle hunters in Italy, devoted to their craft and to each other. Quietly beautiful observation of people doing what they've always done.

But Very little happens. It's a mood piece, not a story, and a slow one at that.

Some Kind of Heaven2021

A documentary about residents of a retirement community that's half-gorgeous and half-isolating. It has Daughters' sense that life is more complicated than any single feeling.

But The tone is detached—sometimes too much so—and the portrait can feel a bit cold.

Kodachrome2017

A photographer's dying wish sends his estranged son on a road trip. It's small and genuine, about the distance grief can create and whether we can close it.

But It's a narrative film with a familiar structure, and the emotional beats can feel slightly preordained.

La Haine1995

Both are about young people learning to carry impossible weights. Where Daughters is quiet, La Haine is explosive, but both refuse to sentimentalize or preach about suffering.

Three young men navigate one day in Paris after a friend is hospitalized by police. Shot in black-and-white, it's urgent and furious and gorgeously made, about rage and survival and love between people with nothing else.

But It's a narrative film in French, and structurally it's tense and propulsive in ways Daughters isn't—some will find that alienating.

Grey Gardens1976

Both are unflinching documentaries about the texture of life when everything has gone wrong. Neither film looks away, and both find something luminous in the wreckage—not despite the pain, but threaded through it.

A documentary portrait of two reclusive women living in decay on a Long Island estate. It's hypnotic, uncomfortable, and utterly absorbing—a mirror held up to eccentricity and connection and the ways people endure.

But It's uncomfortably voyeuristic. You'll watch two people in genuine distress, and the film doesn't apologize for that or offer you a moral escape route.