Never Rarely Sometimes Always 2020 Movie Reviews & Film Trailer Release

Few indie directors today navigate private spaces and fraught environments as effectively as Eliza Hittman, whose first two features “It Felt Like Love” and “Beach Rats” heralded a singular chronicler of young people in the thick of complicated desire.

With “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” which premiered at Sundance and received an early VOD release on Friday after its theatrical release was truncated by the coronavirus, Hittman looks at one of the consequences of desire, as specifically experienced by the half that can get pregnant. In relaying a pair of teenage cousins’ tense overnight journey across the state line, Hittman wades into one of the more charged subjects of our time — abortion access — with the kind of sensitivity, focus and detail that will ensure its place as a dramatic standard for how to put a human face on a controversial topic.

Despite a tone that avoids explicit politics, there’s absolutely no question where Hittman’s sympathies lie as she unfolds her near-procedural story of the events surrounding a momentous decision made decisively. And yet it’s in the obstacle-laden path of her central character (who can know, who will help, how she’ll get it, what it takes) that the film gathers in force to become a quietly urgent portrait of womanhood as a still-and-ever social-legal minefield of expectations, strictures and imperiled agency.

The title itself — referencing the choices offered high schooler Autumn (newcomer Sidney Flanigan) on a medical form about her sexual history — speaks both to the aura of assessment and limitation women can be made to feel even in what should be the safest of spaces and to the temporality inherent in any story whose subject reflects on the plight of women to control their own destiny.

Arriving the year after we lost Agnès Varda, Hittman’s film feels like an essential continuation of that masterful French filmmaker’s legacy of stories about women making their way through life’s gauntlets. And considering the fact that Hittman’s returning “Beach Rats” cinematographer Hélène Louvart once worked with Varda (on “The Beaches of Agnès”), that connection across the span of female-made art feels even more apt.

When we first see 17-year-old Autumn, she’s in a talent show ironically singing a folk rendition of the ’60s girl-group lament “He’s Got The Power.” The subtext is apparent later at a pizza parlor, sitting with her clueless mom (Sharon Van Etten, “The OA”) and brittle stepfather (Ryan Eggold, “New Amsterdam”) — they see Autumn as just a scowling pill — when she bolts from the table and throws water in the face of a taunting teenage boy.