Never Rarely Sometimes Always

04/01/2026

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Never Rarely Sometimes Always possesses ambiguities that can seem prejudicial, others, inferred. Is the boy on the bus, Jason (Theodore Pellerin), a pest? Is this figure the central character Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), and her cousin (Talia Ryder) meet on the way to New York from Pennsylvania, a sleazy guy or a helpful stranger? Could he be both? When Autumn speaks to a health worker at an abortion clinic in New York, are the questions too intrusive, or does the woman not show enough concern? Perhaps most importantly, and inferentially, is her stepfather, one of the six people she has acknowledged as a lover, and is he responsible for the pregnancy, and for the abuse she talks about? Also, what are we to make of the woman at the abortion clinic in her home town who puts on a pro-life video and seems to be far from objective in her advice about whether or not she should keep the fetus?
As with Eliza Hittman’s previous film, Beach Rats, Hittman appears drawn to characters who are drawn to silence, may be inarticulate and, too, be careful over whom and how they express their feelings. In the earlier film, the emphasis was on the sexual encounter, with the central character unable to see that his desire for men is more central to his personality than he is willing to admit. In Never Rarely….all the sexual encounters have been in the past: if the boy on the bus might seem a pest, it will partly be that we are seeing the film chiefly through Autumn’s eyes. He may be hitting on her cousin, but Autumn will probably know the behaviour well: the boss at work has been unequivocally sleazy as he can’t leave her cousin alone, and an older customer has been all but hitting on Skylar at the checkout. But rather than seeing all men as unsavoury, Hittman surely wants us to see them as distinguishable in their attempts to gain a woman’s affections. Pellerin may say, ”How was [Jasper] not understanding the signals of like, these girls not wanting him to keep on talking and going? It was so weird for me. Every masculine presence in the film puts pressure on the girls.” (ID Magazine) But this is a pressure applied quite differently in each instance. Skylar lies about her age, and so Jason is hitting on a girl he thinks is older than she is; an age the boss will know, and yet that doesn’t stop him from making advances on his young employee. As for the man at the checkout, he illustrates the difficulty women sometimes have in making small talk without many men assuming it is a come-on. Skylar jokes that it is suspiciously like he is throwing a party as she puts various items through the checkout, but the man sees it as a reason for more than shooting the breeze.
These are all different experiences, even if cumulatively they suggest an obstacle course. By seeing the film chiefly from Autumn’s perspective, this is how the men must seem, even if all these encounters happen to her cousin. But when Hittman says, “it’s a transformational moment for Skylar. It’s her coming-of-age moment. It ages her. For Autumn, it [is] almost the reverse journey, trying to reclaim her youth because she does not want, nor is she ready to become a mother” (CreativeScreenwriting.Com), we might assume the experience with Jasper for Skylar is equivocal but not terrible. Various experiences for Autumn have been.
The film remains vague on the specifics while being clear on the facts, a brilliant piece of expositional limitation and revelation by virtue of the environment in which Autumn’s sexual encounters are discussed. The woman at the abortion clinic in New York asks her various questions about her sexual experiences, and she details them with hesitation, as though well aware that the counsellor wants to comprehend her sexual history, but that Autumn isn’t obliged to expand on her emotional one. What the film offers is a lot of information without it appearing confessional. It leaves the viewer to wonder who these lovers might have been and who might have abused her. It obliges us to think again about moments that have already passed: scenes with people joking and laughing as Autumn performs solo with a guitar at a school event, and what to make of some of her stepfather’s reactions, even those of the manager at the supermarket. The viewer finds themselves in a position a little like Autumn, but for inverse reasons. If Autumn feels that all men are troublesome because of the abuse she has received from men we don’t know (the film doesn’t indicate clearly any of the men she has been involved with, and we have no idea with whom she became pregnant), then for the viewer the men we do know who we see on screen become problematic partly due to this added information offered halfway through the film.
Critics have been quick to comment on the documentarian, with Mark Kermode saying the film possesses “the gritty authenticity of a documentary” (Guardian). But it might be more useful to speak of the observational. The film observes behaviour without dramatising it, and this can give a film a retrospective aspect when a plot point is delivered. A less observational film might have shown Autumn abused, discover that she was pregnant, and we then comprehend the perpetrator, well aware of these facts. Yet by withholding them, Hittman makes the viewer aware of a permeatingly problematic milieu that we need to observe closely because we have no villain but many possible culprits. She wants us to observe men’s behaviour rather than focus on revenge. This makes Autumn a potentially passive rather than active character. Yet this is surely vital to Hittman’s approach. It isn’t until halfway through the film that we can infer that she has been raped; the film has instead up till then proposed that her home and school environment has been ugly and insensitive, but it appears to be more than that, and perhaps a different film, while still interested in withholding the key information till halfway, would have had her return to Pennsylvania and get even.
This wouldn’t necessarily make for a bad film, and could confront the viewer with two very different deaths (a foetus’s and the possible perpetrator of the act that lead to the pregnancy) which would have shown Hittman interested in the ethically troublesome over the ethically sensible: that whatever the claims of pro-lifers (who equate abortion with murder), the viewer would be diegetically asked to see how very different they are, no matter how odious the perpetrator may be. The point for many who support abortion is that it isn’t the taking of a life but the choice of a woman and how she should live hers. A film about revenge might show that there is a big difference between a man she might wish to kill and a foetus to which she refuses to give birth.
Speaking of the resistance to strong drama, Hittman says “there’s no antagonist. I didn’t want an antagonist. In lieu of having an antagonist, I put thought into considering how the environment these young women found themselves in could be an antagonist.” (Cineaste) The director shows us a world that is uncooperative on both bureaucratic and patriarchal levels. The people she deals with in the clinics in Pennsylvania and New York are women, and are generally sympathetic, even empathic, but they are caught in moral expectations or strict regulations, while the men are present on the street, at school, on the bus, on the subway, and at the checkout. They offer degrees of the predatory and the insensitive: the stepfather doesn’t want to compliment her after Autumn sings at the beginning of the film, the supermarket boss is odious; the checkout guy a crude chancer; the man on the subway a pervert who starts masturbating in front of Autumn, and Jasper somewhere between a pick-up artist and a knight in tarnished armour. (He cops a snog and helps them out with cash.)
This potentially becomes a problem: that rather than a clear perpetrator, Hittman has moved so in the other direction that she arrives at a different type of obviousness: all men are creeps. There is some truth to this (with the man on the metro perhaps a creepiness too far) but the film wishes to make clear how hostile the world can seem to women at the best of times, and this is the worst of them: a teenage girl who has been sexually abused carrying an alien form in her body that she can’t easily dispel, given circumstances that demand parental consent.
It might seem vulgar to propose the abortion film as a genre, but more provocative still to see that the abortion film is less a genre than a subject that adopts a genre according to its needs. Juno is a comedy; Vera Drake, a social realist drama; 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, almost a thriller; and Happening has moments close to a horror movie . Whether it is the leading character disposing of her friend’s foetus in eighties Romania, in 4 Months…, or the abortionist doing everything she can with rudimentary equipment in the sixties set  French film Happening, the films create tension and terror out of what should be no more than a medical procedure. If Hittman had moved in the direction we proposed the film could have been a revenge drama. One reason why we didn’t want to suggest this would have been a terrible thing, in itself, is that films can adopt aspects of the generic without at all falling into the expectation that it must abide by the tropes; instead, only taking from genre what the film needs to make us think about a subject. Never Rarely…is a coming-of-age drama, a little like Juno, but without the comedy and with a much greater sense of the subject’s gravity. Speaking of Juno, Hittman acknowledges that screenwriter Diablo Cody isn’t pro-life: “I don’t think she’s anti-abortion, but I do think that movie is conveying certain messages.” (Cineaste) With Juno, it is as though its comedic throughline works better with her having the baby than not, and it is the comedy that is key, not abortion rights. However, that risks sending a more mixed message than perhaps the film wished.
Never Rarely... wants to register what in contemporary parlance would be called a hostile environment, hence the bureaucratic and the patriarchal, within a sensitively tactile visual milieu. Autumn rarely speaks but often looks, registering her thoughts in the pre-verbal that is captured by Helene Louvart’s cinematography. Louvart has worked with Hittman before (on Beach Rats), but also with Sandrine Veysette, Dominique Cabrera and Alice Rohrwacher, directors who have sought from Louvart camerawork that often stays close to the character and conveys, in point of view, what can’t always be expressed in words. Frequently in Never Rarely… it is the reaction or the point of view that conveys what is on Autumn’s mind: when she looks round at her cousin as the man asks her if she likes to party; when Jason gives Skylar his phone to call her number; when she observes an apparently happy and affectionate couple kissing on the underground train. The camera often looks at Autumn and occasionally shows what she is looking at, and from this, the film hopes to reveal her character without Autumn feeling obliged to reveal the specific backstory of her predicament.
It gives the film ambiguity that we might wish was evident too in a sound design that can seem a little insistent, and a pervading unsavoury masculinity that doesn’t always seem to reflect the director’s demand for nuance. “From a student heckler to Autumn’s menacing stepfather,” Rachel Aroesti says, “the creeps just keep coming: customers at the shop where Skylar and Autumn work; the girls’ boss; the man masturbating in the subway car.” (Guardian) But though Aroesti, interviewing Hittman, says that she sees the director’s ‘’decision to portray this threat as structural rather than personal”, the film’s achievement comes from absorbing the structural into the personal - by making it chiefly about and from Autumn’s perceptual field. The man on the subway seems to push the film over into hyperbole, into an exaggerated sleaziness that Autumn understandably sees and that the film wants to register in the various men who could potentially have abused her.
But if the film is chiefly about Autumn’s sense of the world, then to turn that sense into fact when the film has worked hard to remain as ambiguous as it can, while making clear the hostility of toxic masculinity (another fashionably modern term that nevertheless too has its uses), is to give the film a polemical aspect that counters its general subtlety. Equally, the sound design as score often comes in when the indifference of the environment is best captured by the discordant rhythms of everyday life. Louvart’s camera is so astute at registering feeling that the score can appear indecisively intrusive, like music that doesn’t quite want to cue the emotions, yet is still too present to match the shading of almost everything else in the film. This is Hittman’s third work and shows a style clearly developing after It Felt Like Love and Beach Rats, a work like Heaven Knows What, Werewolf, The Killing of Two Lovers, Bloody Noise, Empty Pockets, The Assistant, Swallow, and James White, showing that quiet, independent American cinema is in good shape indeed. A pity the state of US abortion law isn’t in quite so healthy a condition.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Never Rarely Sometimes Always

Never Rarely Sometimes Always possesses ambiguities that can seem prejudicial, others, inferred. Is the boy on the bus, Jason (Theodore Pellerin), a pest? Is this figure the central character Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), and her cousin (Talia Ryder) meet on the way to New York from Pennsylvania, a sleazy guy or a helpful stranger? Could he be both? When Autumn speaks to a health worker at an abortion clinic in New York, are the questions too intrusive, or does the woman not show enough concern? Perhaps most importantly, and inferentially, is her stepfather, one of the six people she has acknowledged as a lover, and is he responsible for the pregnancy, and for the abuse she talks about? Also, what are we to make of the woman at the abortion clinic in her home town who puts on a pro-life video and seems to be far from objective in her advice about whether or not she should keep the fetus?
As with Eliza Hittman’s previous film, Beach Rats, Hittman appears drawn to characters who are drawn to silence, may be inarticulate and, too, be careful over whom and how they express their feelings. In the earlier film, the emphasis was on the sexual encounter, with the central character unable to see that his desire for men is more central to his personality than he is willing to admit. In Never Rarely….all the sexual encounters have been in the past: if the boy on the bus might seem a pest, it will partly be that we are seeing the film chiefly through Autumn’s eyes. He may be hitting on her cousin, but Autumn will probably know the behaviour well: the boss at work has been unequivocally sleazy as he can’t leave her cousin alone, and an older customer has been all but hitting on Skylar at the checkout. But rather than seeing all men as unsavoury, Hittman surely wants us to see them as distinguishable in their attempts to gain a woman’s affections. Pellerin may say, ”How was [Jasper] not understanding the signals of like, these girls not wanting him to keep on talking and going? It was so weird for me. Every masculine presence in the film puts pressure on the girls.” (ID Magazine) But this is a pressure applied quite differently in each instance. Skylar lies about her age, and so Jason is hitting on a girl he thinks is older than she is; an age the boss will know, and yet that doesn’t stop him from making advances on his young employee. As for the man at the checkout, he illustrates the difficulty women sometimes have in making small talk without many men assuming it is a come-on. Skylar jokes that it is suspiciously like he is throwing a party as she puts various items through the checkout, but the man sees it as a reason for more than shooting the breeze.
These are all different experiences, even if cumulatively they suggest an obstacle course. By seeing the film chiefly from Autumn’s perspective, this is how the men must seem, even if all these encounters happen to her cousin. But when Hittman says, “it’s a transformational moment for Skylar. It’s her coming-of-age moment. It ages her. For Autumn, it [is] almost the reverse journey, trying to reclaim her youth because she does not want, nor is she ready to become a mother” (CreativeScreenwriting.Com), we might assume the experience with Jasper for Skylar is equivocal but not terrible. Various experiences for Autumn have been.
The film remains vague on the specifics while being clear on the facts, a brilliant piece of expositional limitation and revelation by virtue of the environment in which Autumn’s sexual encounters are discussed. The woman at the abortion clinic in New York asks her various questions about her sexual experiences, and she details them with hesitation, as though well aware that the counsellor wants to comprehend her sexual history, but that Autumn isn’t obliged to expand on her emotional one. What the film offers is a lot of information without it appearing confessional. It leaves the viewer to wonder who these lovers might have been and who might have abused her. It obliges us to think again about moments that have already passed: scenes with people joking and laughing as Autumn performs solo with a guitar at a school event, and what to make of some of her stepfather’s reactions, even those of the manager at the supermarket. The viewer finds themselves in a position a little like Autumn, but for inverse reasons. If Autumn feels that all men are troublesome because of the abuse she has received from men we don’t know (the film doesn’t indicate clearly any of the men she has been involved with, and we have no idea with whom she became pregnant), then for the viewer the men we do know who we see on screen become problematic partly due to this added information offered halfway through the film.
Critics have been quick to comment on the documentarian, with Mark Kermode saying the film possesses “the gritty authenticity of a documentary” (Guardian). But it might be more useful to speak of the observational. The film observes behaviour without dramatising it, and this can give a film a retrospective aspect when a plot point is delivered. A less observational film might have shown Autumn abused, discover that she was pregnant, and we then comprehend the perpetrator, well aware of these facts. Yet by withholding them, Hittman makes the viewer aware of a permeatingly problematic milieu that we need to observe closely because we have no villain but many possible culprits. She wants us to observe men’s behaviour rather than focus on revenge. This makes Autumn a potentially passive rather than active character. Yet this is surely vital to Hittman’s approach. It isn’t until halfway through the film that we can infer that she has been raped; the film has instead up till then proposed that her home and school environment has been ugly and insensitive, but it appears to be more than that, and perhaps a different film, while still interested in withholding the key information till halfway, would have had her return to Pennsylvania and get even.
This wouldn’t necessarily make for a bad film, and could confront the viewer with two very different deaths (a foetus’s and the possible perpetrator of the act that lead to the pregnancy) which would have shown Hittman interested in the ethically troublesome over the ethically sensible: that whatever the claims of pro-lifers (who equate abortion with murder), the viewer would be diegetically asked to see how very different they are, no matter how odious the perpetrator may be. The point for many who support abortion is that it isn’t the taking of a life but the choice of a woman and how she should live hers. A film about revenge might show that there is a big difference between a man she might wish to kill and a foetus to which she refuses to give birth.
Speaking of the resistance to strong drama, Hittman says “there’s no antagonist. I didn’t want an antagonist. In lieu of having an antagonist, I put thought into considering how the environment these young women found themselves in could be an antagonist.” (Cineaste) The director shows us a world that is uncooperative on both bureaucratic and patriarchal levels. The people she deals with in the clinics in Pennsylvania and New York are women, and are generally sympathetic, even empathic, but they are caught in moral expectations or strict regulations, while the men are present on the street, at school, on the bus, on the subway, and at the checkout. They offer degrees of the predatory and the insensitive: the stepfather doesn’t want to compliment her after Autumn sings at the beginning of the film, the supermarket boss is odious; the checkout guy a crude chancer; the man on the subway a pervert who starts masturbating in front of Autumn, and Jasper somewhere between a pick-up artist and a knight in tarnished armour. (He cops a snog and helps them out with cash.)
This potentially becomes a problem: that rather than a clear perpetrator, Hittman has moved so in the other direction that she arrives at a different type of obviousness: all men are creeps. There is some truth to this (with the man on the metro perhaps a creepiness too far) but the film wishes to make clear how hostile the world can seem to women at the best of times, and this is the worst of them: a teenage girl who has been sexually abused carrying an alien form in her body that she can’t easily dispel, given circumstances that demand parental consent.
It might seem vulgar to propose the abortion film as a genre, but more provocative still to see that the abortion film is less a genre than a subject that adopts a genre according to its needs. Juno is a comedy; Vera Drake, a social realist drama; 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, almost a thriller; and Happening has moments close to a horror movie . Whether it is the leading character disposing of her friend’s foetus in eighties Romania, in 4 Months…, or the abortionist doing everything she can with rudimentary equipment in the sixties set  French film Happening, the films create tension and terror out of what should be no more than a medical procedure. If Hittman had moved in the direction we proposed the film could have been a revenge drama. One reason why we didn’t want to suggest this would have been a terrible thing, in itself, is that films can adopt aspects of the generic without at all falling into the expectation that it must abide by the tropes; instead, only taking from genre what the film needs to make us think about a subject. Never Rarely…is a coming-of-age drama, a little like Juno, but without the comedy and with a much greater sense of the subject’s gravity. Speaking of Juno, Hittman acknowledges that screenwriter Diablo Cody isn’t pro-life: “I don’t think she’s anti-abortion, but I do think that movie is conveying certain messages.” (Cineaste) With Juno, it is as though its comedic throughline works better with her having the baby than not, and it is the comedy that is key, not abortion rights. However, that risks sending a more mixed message than perhaps the film wished.
Never Rarely... wants to register what in contemporary parlance would be called a hostile environment, hence the bureaucratic and the patriarchal, within a sensitively tactile visual milieu. Autumn rarely speaks but often looks, registering her thoughts in the pre-verbal that is captured by Helene Louvart’s cinematography. Louvart has worked with Hittman before (on Beach Rats), but also with Sandrine Veysette, Dominique Cabrera and Alice Rohrwacher, directors who have sought from Louvart camerawork that often stays close to the character and conveys, in point of view, what can’t always be expressed in words. Frequently in Never Rarely… it is the reaction or the point of view that conveys what is on Autumn’s mind: when she looks round at her cousin as the man asks her if she likes to party; when Jason gives Skylar his phone to call her number; when she observes an apparently happy and affectionate couple kissing on the underground train. The camera often looks at Autumn and occasionally shows what she is looking at, and from this, the film hopes to reveal her character without Autumn feeling obliged to reveal the specific backstory of her predicament.
It gives the film ambiguity that we might wish was evident too in a sound design that can seem a little insistent, and a pervading unsavoury masculinity that doesn’t always seem to reflect the director’s demand for nuance. “From a student heckler to Autumn’s menacing stepfather,” Rachel Aroesti says, “the creeps just keep coming: customers at the shop where Skylar and Autumn work; the girls’ boss; the man masturbating in the subway car.” (Guardian) But though Aroesti, interviewing Hittman, says that she sees the director’s ‘’decision to portray this threat as structural rather than personal”, the film’s achievement comes from absorbing the structural into the personal - by making it chiefly about and from Autumn’s perceptual field. The man on the subway seems to push the film over into hyperbole, into an exaggerated sleaziness that Autumn understandably sees and that the film wants to register in the various men who could potentially have abused her.
But if the film is chiefly about Autumn’s sense of the world, then to turn that sense into fact when the film has worked hard to remain as ambiguous as it can, while making clear the hostility of toxic masculinity (another fashionably modern term that nevertheless too has its uses), is to give the film a polemical aspect that counters its general subtlety. Equally, the sound design as score often comes in when the indifference of the environment is best captured by the discordant rhythms of everyday life. Louvart’s camera is so astute at registering feeling that the score can appear indecisively intrusive, like music that doesn’t quite want to cue the emotions, yet is still too present to match the shading of almost everything else in the film. This is Hittman’s third work and shows a style clearly developing after It Felt Like Love and Beach Rats, a work like Heaven Knows What, Werewolf, The Killing of Two Lovers, Bloody Noise, Empty Pockets, The Assistant, Swallow, and James White, showing that quiet, independent American cinema is in good shape indeed. A pity the state of US abortion law isn’t in quite so healthy a condition.

© Tony McKibbin