Over the years I’ve seen more than my share of dysfunctional-family movies and terminal-illness movies, and even the good ones have trouble sidestepping clichés. So it says something that His Three Daughters, which is about a dysfunctional family coping with a terminal illness, doesn’t feel like a retread.

The writer-director Azazel Jacobs has a knack for putting a fresh, intelligent spin on familiar material, from the high-school misfit comedy Terri to the playful marital drama The Lovers. His latest, His Three Daughters, is a sharply written and beautifully modulated chamber piece, set over a few days inside a Lower Manhattan apartment where three women have gathered to bid farewell to their father, Vincent, who’s in hospice care.

Carrie Coon plays Katie, the oldest of the three sisters. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and teenage daughter, but she hasn’t been around to visit her dad much lately. Elizabeth Olsen plays the youngest, Christina, who’s flown in from her home thousands of miles away.

And then there’s Rachel — that’s Natasha Lyonne. She lives with Vincent in this apartment and has been looking after him for some time. Rachel is estranged from her two sisters, for reasons that aren’t initially clear. Jacobs drops us right into the thick of the tension, then gradually fills in the larger picture.

Some of the friction stems from the fact that Katie and Christina are essentially outsiders on Rachel’s turf. Rachel can claim some moral high ground, since she’s been taking care of their dad while they’ve been busy living their lives and raising families of their own.

Adding to the two-against-one dynamic is the fact that Rachel isn’t biologically related to her sisters or their father. After Vincent’s first wife died, he married Rachel’s mom and raised Rachel as his own. As Rachel makes needlessly clear to her sisters, she’s no less his daughter than they are.

There are money and class issues, too; Katie looks down on Rachel, claiming all she does is smoke weed all day and make money through sports gambling. And then there’s the matter of real estate. In one contentious conversation, Katie insinuates that Rachel has been taking care of Vincent partly because of her enviable living situation.

In this and every other scene, the acting and the writing have such specificity that you feel you know these characters intimately. Few actors can make anger more mesmerizing than Coon, and her Katie is testy and judgmental, even — or especially — when she tries to seem reasonable.

It’s hard not to side a lot of the time with Lyonne’s Rachel, who lets the expletives fly as she pushes back defensively against Katie’s insinuations. That leaves Christina in the tough role of peacemaker. She’s earnest and open-hearted by nature, something that comes out when she describes her Deadhead past. In Olsen’s quietly moving performance, we see a woman who often suppresses her feelings to spare those of others.

What distinguishes His Three Daughters from so many movies of its type is that while it’s certainly talky, it never feels as if the characters are trying to explain themselves to you. Rather than coughing up large chunks of backstory, their interactions have the pull of honest, free-flowing conversation.

Much of the dialogue is taken up with the practical and wholly relatable end-of-life details: the difficulties of writing an obituary, or arranging a do-not-resuscitate order, or even dealing with a well-meaning but slightly exasperating hospice care worker. I haven’t seen many movies that so acutely understand the role food plays in a situation like this, where the act of cooking meals for your family or making sure there’s always fresh coffee can be both a drag and a welcome distraction.

Vincent himself is off-camera for most of the movie, sleeping quietly in his room, though Jacobs wisely gives him — and Jay O. Sanders, the actor playing him — a beautiful moment in the film’s last act.

The question hanging over His Three Daughters is whether the sisters will overcome their estrangement and remain family after Vincent’s gone. Jacobs doesn’t force a resolution, though he does end on a note of hard-won understanding that I found both optimistic and deeply affecting. He’s made a movie that, in the shadow of death, says something essential about how we live.

At 5:11 p.m. on a Friday, my phone buzzed with a message from Matt. I was deep in work for my graduate program, and his text left me momentarily stunned. The same Matt who had ghosted me despite promising to call was now reaching out again. “Hey! Are you in OC still? I’m visiting Noah for the weekend and if you are, I was curious if you’d be game to meet up and have a long-awaited chit chat!!”

The day he ghosted me, Matt had told me, “I’m free to call you on Thursday. I’ll check my schedule and confirm tomorrow.”

He never did although his profile picture — Modigliani’s portrait of Jean Cocteau — consistently lingered under my Instagram Stories views. This ghosting, though familiar, felt particularly jarring.

We had met on Instagram. We were both alumni of the same college. He had swiped up on one of my Instagram Stories: a snippet from an Andy Warhol interview with Joan Didion. “This is perfect, what is this from?” he asked. We texted back and forth about Didion, Southern California and the drought that had marked our teenage years. We bonded over the irony of leaving our hometowns only to return.

Despite our deep chats and daily texts about Scorsese movies, iconography and William T. Vollmann, our relationship remained undefined. I was still nursing the wounds of a spring breakup, and though Matt never asked me out, our rambling conversations were intoxicating. This was new and thrilling, especially compared to my most recent relationship, which had been stifling and lacked chemistry.

In the whirlwind of Southern California, where relationships in your 20s can feel as fleeting and unpredictable as traffic on the 405, Matt seemed like a refreshing anomaly. He had played college baseball, but insisted that his real passions were more aligned with Terrence Malick, Nietzsche and obscure indie bands.

However, it wasn’t long before Matt started ghosting me — often mid-conversation. After I hadn’t heard from him in three months, despite his consistent viewing of all my Stories, my friends urged me to cut ties. “I’ll buy you a chai if you finally remove his ass,” my friend Allie said jokingly. I did, and we laughed over drinks, celebrating the end of this particular chapter.

Matt requested to follow me again on Instagram many months later. One morning, while I was driving down to Long Beach, his name popped up on my locked screen. I accepted his request and followed him back, assuming that he would address his absence. He did not. I shot him a brief iMessage asking what was new. Our resulting exchange was friendly but shallow, and he vanished again, resurfacing a month later to swipe up on a Story about a band we both liked.

We started texting back and forth every day again, him professing that he had been directing his time and energy toward “love and becoming” and noting that he felt unable to dialogue deeply with others until “the energy paradigm has been met, ideally down to the quantum level.” Eventually, I asked him to call, and he agreed enthusiastically, stating that he admired me and chuckling that this had been “a long time coming.”

And in a story as old as time, he promised me that he would confirm and then he promptly proceeded to ghost me again. It was that weekend when I discovered he’d been dating someone. I felt uncomfortable, as I never would have been able to tell he was in a relationship. He had said nothing about a partner. I sent him a couple of voice messages expressing my discomfort.

He didn’t open my messages, and then, of course, reached out again on another platform, eager to plan dinner with me while he was back in town. I was in a Huntington Beach coffee shop on a Saturday morning, sipping a lavender latte, when he called to finalize plans. We arranged to walk after Mass, but he never responded to my message about timing (“it’s Novus Ordo, so what about 5:30?”).

The following morning, I ended our connection, telling him that he lacked follow-through and that it was astounding that he could wax poetic about so many things and yet treat me more like an abstract concept than a person with feelings — someone who wouldn’t be hurt because she was on the other side of the screen and couldn’t be touched. He didn’t reply. He just stopped following me on Instagram.

If that wasn’t enough, a girlfriend from college informed me that one of her close friends had a similar experience with him several years back.

Unfortunately, the line between “indie f—boy” and “man who shares my passions and interests” has proved to be incredibly thin.

As a graduate student in theology and library science, it can be challenging to find a guy who can sustain a meaningful conversation. But it was through Matt that I realized it can sometimes be worse when the guy is actually able to. Despite his insistence on portraying himself as a “creative” and “artist,” he was more invested in curating a persona than in maintaining a stable connection.

Sure, he called himself a co-founder of a filmmaking studio, but the artsy black-and-white photos of him smoking tobacco and staring off into the distance at the Getty made it clear that he was most interested in playing the role of the brooding and misunderstood artist — someone who enjoyed possessing me when it was comfortable for him, but had no real desire to reciprocate. I wasn’t his friend; I was the scene partner in his A24 movie.

As I told him in my final iMessage, effectively ending our on-and-off connection that had never culminated in a meetup, “I’m a person behind the screen, not a philosophy book, not an intellectual fantasy.” A man acting like the protagonist in a Cigarettes After Sex song, I told myself while deleting his contact information, isn’t going to be the great love of your life.

The author is a writer and graduate student living in the Greater Los Angeles area. She’s on Instagram: @julialouisemorrow

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.