Never Rarely Sometimes Always: A Movie for Women, Defiantly Pro-Voice

The stomach punches are both figurative and literal in Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Eliza Hittman’s searing, soaring new film. Pain is everywhere in this movie: in the bruises that color its heroine’s abdomen, in the tears that crawl down her cheeks, in the casual insults and vulgar leering that she silently absorbs. But what makes Hittman’s work special is her generosity of spirit. Her honesty is unflinching; her compassion is revelatory.

When we first meet Autumn (a heartbreaking Sidney Flanigan), she’s performing at a high school talent show, strumming “He’s Got the Power” as a male student from the audience yells out, “Slut!” It’s the first of many indignities she endures, a steady stream of degradation that Hittman presents with crushing matter-of-factness. Autumn is hardly a submissive wallflower; at one point, she avenges an unspecified offense by flinging a cup of water in a boy’s face. But regular humiliation and bodily invasion are nevertheless facts of her small-town life. Whenever she clocks out of her shift as a cashier at a grocery store, she reaches through a screened partition and hands her faceless manager a wad of bills; as she does so, he peppers her wrist with unsolicited kisses.

Autumn tolerates this behavior without a word, which itself speaks volumes, about both her predicament and Hittman’s style. Making her third feature—her prior film, Beach Rats, was an uneven but engaging study of a young tough who concealed his homosexuality—the director disdains exposition, which doesn’t mean that her storytelling is opaque. She conveys information cleanly and efficiently, relying on carefully calibrated images and her actors’ faces rather than dialogue. The color palette of Never Rarely Sometimes Always can occasionally feel drab (accentuating the trudging mundanity of Autumn’s life), but Hittman studiously avoids the aesthetic sloppiness that afflicts so many modern indies. Her camera is spare, but precise; it tells you exactly what you need to know.

What you need to know here is that Autumn is pregnant, and she wants to get an abortion. That’s pretty much the entire plot, though problems and complications inevitably ensue. In some ways, Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a classic problem-solving picture, not unlike The Shallows or The Martian. Faced with a daunting challenge, Autumn must use her smarts and her resolve to overcome the forces arrayed against her in order to achieve a clearly defined goal. Except that instead of fighting deadly sharks or outer space, she’s battling a tangled web of patriarchal attitudes and governmental interference, one designed to limit her choices and strip her of her autonomy.

It’s a disturbing ride, but what’s truly dispiriting about Autumn’s odyssey is how plausible it feels—how familiar. Hittman invests the proceedings with a fine-grained realism that carries with it a sense of collective experience. Autumn’s crucible is so scary precisely because it could happen to any woman in America.

But it very much happens to her, specifically; Never Rarely Sometimes Always is too intimate, too grounded in its characters, to be a mere polemic. Autumn’s coming-of-age journey isn’t so much one of self-discovery—one of the many astute notes of Hittman’s screenplay is that her protagonist never second-guesses her decision—as it is one of dawning awareness of the surrounding world. Early on, Autumn wanders into a gently lit building that proves to be a crisis pregnancy center, one of those seemingly inviting facilities that cloaks its anti-choice mission in faux kindness, but which nonetheless traffics in deception and fearmongering. Uncovering its duplicity is one of her sobering realizations, as is her learning, via a quick Google search, that Pennsylvania requires parental consent for a minor seeking an abortion. Only after a helpless, desperate attempt at self-harm—resulting in those aforementioned bruises—does she come clean to her cousin, Skylar (Talia Ryder), who swiftly plants the pair on a bus to New York, at which point the film’s dusky atmosphere is replaced by bright lights and whirring sounds.

The shift in setting only enriches Hittman’s filmmaking, which is both thematically powerful and powerfully restrained. She might have been tempted to turn her characters into victims in a veritable horror movie. Instead, she keeps things even-keeled, if consistently unnerving.

Certainly, Autumn and Skylar stare down their share of unpleasantness. At one point, a man on the subway starts masturbating in front of them, just because he can. A chance meeting with a fresh-faced young man (Théodore Pellerin, from On Becoming a God in Central Florida) roils with a distinctly transactional subtext. And in the movie’s most patently devastating scene, Autumn answers blunt questions posed by a solicitous medical counselor (real-life professional Kelly Chapman); Flanigan, in her first ever role, is achingly vulnerable in this sequence, eyes quietly welling with tears as she reveals the extent of Autumn’s trauma one mumbled word at a time. (The film’s title derives from the multiple-choice continuum attached to these probing questions.)

And yet, there’s an intangible warmth to Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a tenderness that ensures it never flirts with miserabilism. It’s evident in Autumn’s interactions with various Planned Parenthood employees, who are all soft-spoken and understanding, but it’s most present in her relationship with Skylar. The loyal cousin serves in a variety of roles relative to Autumn—friend, rival, confidant, irritant, champion—and even if her demeanor can be brusque, it’s plain that she’s indispensable. (For example, it’s Skylar who decisively swipes several hundred dollars from the grocery store’s drawers to fund their excursion.) Together, Hittman and her actors convey a familial bond of deep affection, one that subsists more on glances than words. And if Autumn’s quasi-interrogation functions as the film’s rawest moment, its most touching arrives later on a subway platform, when the two young women silently grasp each other’s fingers, expressing solidarity without needing to speak.

That’s a beautiful sequence, but it also made me wonder: What if Autumn didn’t have Skylar? What if she couldn’t secure enough cash to buy a bus ticket? What if the nearest clinic were 12 hours away instead of three? Never Rarely Sometimes Always conceives of a resilient woman whose obstacles to healthcare, while formidable, are nonetheless conquerable. Yet by implication, it forces you to imagine the torments of those women who lack Autumn’s resources, however meager. In refusing to embellish Autumn’s difficulties, Hittman simultaneously sounds a lament for the voiceless women who are even less fortunate.

Some viewers may find such advocacy unappetizing, even repugnant. And while I myself chafe at how the debate over abortion rights—to me, decidedly a matter of personal liberty—is framed as one in which opposing ideological camps are both cast as “pro” something, it would be naïve of me to pretend that the issue isn’t intensely political and polarizing. (For evidence, just examine the coverage of this week’s Supreme Court decision, which should have been an extremely straightforward case.) So if you disagree with me, then perhaps you’ll perceive this movie differently. Perhaps you’ll regard its plot not as a triumph of perseverance, but as a chronicle of moral failure. Perhaps you’ll judge the employees of Planned Parenthood, not the crisis pregnancy center, to be biased and manipulative. Perhaps you think Autumn is a murderer.

But if that’s the case, then I don’t really care what you think, and more crucially, neither does Autumn. Never Rarely Sometimes Always may be a socially conscious picture, but Autumn isn’t some standard-bearer for a cause. She’s just a woman, one who’s entirely capable of making her own choices. And in telling her story with such rigor and clarity, Hittman has made a movie that honors her without sanctifying her. It never rings false; it’s always suffused with grace.

Grade: A-