Never Rarely Sometimes Always

This film tells a teenage girl having to go through a very difficult time of her life, with only the support of her cousin. The scene which features the title of this film is very effective and emotional. The latter part of the film is pretty slow, but heart wrenching.

I was really impressed by this film. The film making and script worked together so flawlessly to create a story that is so real and interesting and terrifying all at the same time.

The movie is slow but not in a bad way. It takes you along with these characters and makes you almost feel like you are the third person with them on this journey.

I like the stance that the film took with the subject. It didn't give any room for people to have opinions, it just happened. It almost served as an information film about the the struggles and impact that a woman can go though for this procedure in a way that was so 'fly on the wall'. It was like watching 3 days of someone's life.

I think it also shown how difficult it can be to just be a woman in the world and how scary it can be. It didn't do it with big scenes that caused an uproar, it did it with quiet scenes that were just accepted and that makes it even scarier.

I think this film was really well done and really well crafted, the acting was great too. It was one of the indie films that makes you really excited for the world of indie movies.

Autumn Callahan (Sidney Flanigan) is an outsider at school. She's also pregnant. Abortions are restricted in her small town Pennsylvania home and she faces many hurdles. She tells her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder). They steal money from their work and head off to New York City.

This is a sincere pro-choice indie presenting a realistic portrait of a teen girl on her abortion journey. It's not the most dramatic story. The acting is quiet. The drama is muted. I thought the movie may do something with the boy, but it ends up being understated. I certainly understand the simplicity of the story to highlight this issue-centered story. The girls are doing nice work. This is effective for an audience of a certain leaning.

Torn on this. On one hand it's superbly directed and I respect how its shot in such a non-judgemental way, with a real empathy for its characters and the situation they're dealing with. There's a real honesty to it.

But on the other hand it's also.... a bit of a snoozefest at times and kinnnda underwritten. The protagonist is very quiet and reserved, in a role that's super challenging because you have to convey so much with so little. The film lives and dies by how you connect to that character and in this case it just didn't quite work for me.

When trying to understand why, I thought of Manchester by the Sea for some reason and think the lead performance in that film really captured the energy this was going for, albeit much more successfully. The exception to this possibly being the scene this film derives its name from, which is honestly heartbreaking and one of the more moving moments in cinema this year.

The name Eliza Hittman meant nothing to me when I saw it in the credits for this movie, but then the Internet reminded me that she also directed "Beach Rats," one of the undiscovered gems of 2017. Now with "Never Rarely Sometimes Always," Hittman has once again proven herself to be one of the most adept filmmakers at tackling the perilous transition from teenager to adult, whether in boys or girls.

"Never Rarely Sometimes Always" resembles another exceptional abortion film, "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days," though this film doesn't exist in the same menacing environment as that other one. Still, the prospects for the young girl in Hittman's film are no less bleak. For a long time, the film seems to be about the logistics of obtaining an abortion and the desperate lengths a young pregnant woman will go to to have one. But a scene, or should I say THE scene, set in an abortion clinic that gives the film its title, reveals that this film isn't really about abortion as much as it's about sexual abuse and predation. Pregnant or not, abortion or not, this young woman has already been damaged many times before the movie even starts, and it's likely, the film implies, that she'll be damaged again.

Hittman is able to get the most amazing performances out of young and inexperienced actors. In "Beach Rats," she directed Harris Dickinson to an award worthy performance, and she does the same here for Sidney Flanigan, playing an inarticulate and frequently silent young woman whose silence nevertheless speaks volumes.

Grade: A