Sundance review: Young women take a harrowing trip in riveting 'Never Rarely Sometimes Always'

‘Never Rarely Sometimes Always’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic section of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 101 minutes.

Screens again: Saturday, Jan. 25, noon, Resort (Sundance); Sunday, Jan. 26, 9 a.m., PC Library (Park City); Monday, Jan. 27, 3:45 p.m., Broadway 3 (Salt Lake City); Wednesday, Jan. 29, Eccles (Park City); Thursday, Jan. 30, 12:30 p.m., Redstone 1 (Park City).

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Writer-director Eliza Hittman takes a stark and unflinching look at abortion in “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” a drama that doesn’t talk about a teen girl’s wrenching decision than show the emotional stakes of making it.

Seventeen-year-old Autumn (played with soul and steel by Sidney Flanigan) is feeling ill. She goes to a clinic in her rural Pennsylvania town, where she is offered a “self-administered” test — the same one she could have bought at the pharmacy. The women there give her an ultrasound, and tell Autumn she’s about 10 weeks pregnant. They give her brochures about adoption and show a horror-show propaganda video. (Hittman never says it outright, but the “clinic” has the earmarks of an anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy center.”)

After Googling about ways to self-induce an abortion, she decides she needs to go to a real clinic. Since Pennsylvania requires parental consent for girls under 18 to have an abortion, she decides her only option is to go to New York City. Autumn’s cousin, Skylar (Talia Ryder), offers to go with her — and, for good measure, steals some cash from the till at the supermarket where they both work as cashiers.

Many of Autumn and Skylar’s interactions on their trip to New York, where they have some harrowing encounters as they are forced to stay overnight, go without dialogue. Hittman (who last came to Sundance with the coming-of-age drama “Beach Rats”) doesn’t have to fill the silences with gab, so she doesn’t — and the emotional communication between these cousins happens through glances and body language.

Flanigan, who never acted before, and Ryder use that quiet chemistry to convey the horrors of being young women in a society where men casually push their dominance on them, in ways large and small. Watching them navigate that minefield is probably all-too-relatable to women in the audience, and a shameful revelation to the men.