Across the United States, institutions calling themselves Crisis Pregnancy Centers advise their clients not to pursue abortion, but instead either to parent or surrender their child for adoption. As two doctors put it in their 2018 peer-reviewed article “Why Crisis Pregnancy Centers Are Legal but Unethical,” these institutions “strive to give the impression that they are clinical centers, offering legitimate medical services and advice, yet they are exempt from regulatory, licensure, and credentialing oversight that apply to health care facilities.” In fact, these are religious propaganda stations whose proprietors exploit their First Amendment rights to nefarious extremes.



It’s an outrageous situation, but when one such clinic appears in the new movie Never Rarely Sometimes Always, the mood is quiet and sad, not angry. When the Christian lady from the center tells 17-year-old Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) that her fetus’s heartbeat is “the most magical sound you will ever hear,” her client says nothing, just turns her head away from the ultrasound monitor and toward the wall.

Quiet gestures and prolonged silences are key to Never Rarely Sometimes Always, the third movie by Eliza Hittman (available to rent for an astonishing $19.99 via Amazon). Autumn works in a supermarket with her cousin and is unhappily pregnant. Beyond that, we know almost nothing about her. We simply tag along with Autumn and her sympathetic cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) as they travel from Pennsylvania to New York City in search of an abortion not conditional upon parental consent.

The pair have nowhere to stay. Although New York by night is sometimes shockingly beautiful—they go to an arcade in Chinatown, bathed in flickering blue lights—the dangers they encounter are pedestrian and inevitable. A drunk guy in a suit with his shirt untucked slides his hand into his trousers on the otherwise empty subway they’re using as shelter. A college-aged young man begs and whines for them to join him at a “bar downtown.” To top it all off, at dawn, these trembling-lipped teenagers have to face down a horde of chanting Catholics outside Planned Parenthood’s door. It’s a three-day Odyssey with a Planned Parenthood appointment as its telos, and interludes on Greyhounds and subway platforms in between.

Hittman and her editor Scott Cummings (who is also her husband) are particular talents at the art of leaving things out. Autumn speaks very little, despite appearing in almost every shot. We get to know Autumn through her face and her actions, not her speech. Sometimes the camera locks so fixedly on Flanigan that it starts to make you feel boxed in, trapped.