It is very challenging to make a movie about abortion, because you always run the risk of offending people, and of just appealing to your own biases in an ideology-fueled film. This is why movies about abortion tend to be so divisive. They usually just appeal to one side of the pro-choice/pro-life debate and confirm why they’re right, and just piss off people on the opposite side and try telling them why they’re wrong. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is the surprising exception to this, where it takes a really difficult topic and manages to explore it in a way that I think everyone can take something away from.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always centers around a girl named Autumn, who is a 17-year-old living in rural Pennsylvania. I want to take a brief moment to say that it’s never explicitly mentioned what town Autumn lives in, but it looked EXTREMELY close to where I grew up, and there’s hints of it taking place in that area throughout the movie, so this one hit home for me on a personal level. Anyway, very early on Autumn starts to think she’s pregnant. The movie is intentionally vague about how this happened, or even who the father is, but regardless Autumn finds herself in this situation. She then tests positive for pregnancy, and doesn’t feel as though she can take care of the baby. However, abortion laws in Pennsylvania state that a minor can’t get one done without parental consent, and for whatever reason Autumn feels like she can’t go to her parents about her pregnancy. So, she finds herself in a position where she feels like her only option is to go to New York with her cousin Skylar to have an abortion done in secrecy. The movie chronicles how hard this whole process is.

I think the movie smartly decides to not take any sort of definitive stance on the pro-choice/pro-life debate. Instead, it just presents the whole process in the most raw, real way possible, and lets the viewer take away what they want to from it. I can honestly see either side of the debate having a different takeaway after watching the movie. The pro-choice people will see how difficult it is for Autumn to get her abortion and confirm their views that there should be better laws in place to make it easier for people like Autumn to get an abortion, while the pro-life people will see how horrifying Autumn’s experience is and confirm their views that abortion is an awful thing that we should try to abolish. Like I said earlier, it’s really hard to make a movie about abortion that isn’t simply trying to push a certain viewpoint, which is why it’s so impressive that Never Rarely Sometimes Always is able to show such a heavy, difficult topic in a way that lets viewers make the choices for themselves on how to feel about it.

I guess the only downside to all of this is that there isn’t much of an emotional payoff to the whole journey. Autumn is a weird protagonist to follow in this journey because she hardly ever emotes or expresses how she’s feeling. Even when Skylar is asking her questions, she’s intentionally short and vague about everything. There’s never really that cathartic breakdown about how this journey has affected her, and for some viewers that could understandably be a turn-off. I will say that there’s one scene a little over halfway through the movie where Autumn starts crying when talking to a counselor at one of the clinics, and it’s the scene for which the movie gets its title. This is easily the best scene in the movie, and the one where you’re going to feel the most sympathetic towards her. So, it’s not like Never Rarely Sometimes Always is completely devoid of any emotion, it’s just not your typical catharsis that you’d expect from a movie like this. There are some slow drags in the movie, and there were points where I just wished I could know what was going on in Autumn’s head.

Still, despite that, Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a really great movie. This one surprised me, because like I said, any abortion movies I have seen tend to deal with the topic in a much different way. This one felt so raw, and that’s the reason why it ends up feeling so powerful. The acting and directing in this movie is really strong, and ends up carrying the viewer through. If nothing else, I think it’s a great movie to watch for anyone that wants to know what this whole process can be like. From there, you can make your own decisions on how you think this whole topic should be dealt with.

4/5