Never Rarely Sometimes Always

Newcomer Sidney Flanigan delivers a powerful, understated performance in the latest film from Eliza Hittman (It Felt Like Love, Beach Rats). Never Rarely Sometimes Always stars Flanigan as a reserved seventeen-year-old named Autumn who travels from her rural Pennsylvania town to New York City in order to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Her companion on the journey is her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder), who convinces Autumn, after a counselor at their local clinic makes it clear that a safe abortion will not be available in their neck of the woods, to sneak off to the big city where she can take care of her situation without fear of repercussions from her family or peers. 

The trip is tense, difficult, and nearly wordless. While access to abortion in New York City is straightforward and safe, access to the city itself for two underage women with little money is anything but. The film presents its two protagonists as typical, resourceful teenage girls who, by the age of seventeen, have learned through necessity how to navigate a world in which the only real protection from the harsh realities they face are themselves.

It’s devastating that a film set in 2019 America, where a woman’s right to choose is protected by law, should have the fraught, dangerous edge of Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d'Or winning film 4 Weeks, 3 Months, and 2 Days (2007), which takes place in Communist Romania during the 1980s when Nicolae Ceaușescu outlawed abortion in order to increase birth rates in the country—essentially relegating women to the status of second-class citizens duty-bound to carry all pregnancies to term. It’s not coincidental that Never Rarely Sometimes Always recalls 4 Weeks, 3 Months, and 2 Days. Hittman has stated that she made her film in part as a response to Mungiu’s movie, which depicts the female protagonists as broad types—one frivolous and one saintly.

While Hittman’s neo-realistic approach doesn’t pack quite the same cinematic gut-punch as Mungiu’s precise, minimalist aesthetic, the quiet, honest, compelling portrayals of the central characters in Never Rarely Sometimes Always ultimately make it a more moving picture. It humanizes a hot-button political issue the way only a good film can do, by focusing on individuals whose lives are most affected by a given policy or cultural norm, yet who have the least amount of control over the laws that govern and dictate their circumstances.