Never Rarely Sometimes Always
2020 · Eliza Hittman
A pair of teenage girls in rural Pennsylvania travel to New York City to seek out medical help after an unintended pregnancy.
dir. Eliza Hittman · 2020
Eliza Hittman's third feature strips a politically radioactive subject down to logistics: two teenage cousins from rural Pennsylvania, a bus to New York, a handful of dollars, and the quiet arithmetic of where to sleep when the clinic says come back tomorrow. Hittman, who emerged from American independent cinema's neorealist wing with It Felt Like Love and Beach Rats, works close to the body — Hélène Louvart's 16mm camera stays on faces, hands, the backs of necks, finding the whole drama in what the nearly wordless Autumn (newcomer Sidney Flanigan, extraordinary) refuses to say aloud. The title comes from the four answers offered on a clinic intake questionnaire, and the scene built around it — a single slow push-in, no cutaways — is one of the most devastating uses of an unbroken take in recent American film. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Berlin in 2020, weeks before theaters closed. What lingers is the smallest gesture in the film: a hand reached backward in a moment of need, and taken.
Lines of influence
- 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) — Renders an illegal abortion as near-real-time procedure built from long, static, unbroken takes with exposition withheld — the clinical restraint and logistics-first grammar Hittman inherits, including her centerpiece unbroken close-up.
- Rosetta (1999) — Over-the-shoulder handheld camera pinned to the back and nape of a young woman as she problem-solves survival minute to minute, refusing establishing shots — the moral-realist proximity Hittman applies to travel and money.
- Wanda (1970) — Grainy 16mm and a near-wordless, passive female drift through transactional encounters, the drifting-woman road structure and nonprofessional texture that Hittman's grammar descends from.
- Vagabond (1985) — Lateral tracking shots trailing a solitary young woman, the journey built as episodic encounters with strangers who each extract or offer something — Hittman's bus-terminal itinerary of dependencies.
- Ratcatcher (1999) — Poetic social realism in tactile close-up — skin, hands, surfaces — privileging bodily sensation over dialogue, the sensory adolescent subjectivity Hittman foregrounds.
- Fish Tank (2009) — A nonprofessional newcomer lead (Katie Jarvis) filmed in boxed Academy-ratio handheld pressed tight to an inarticulate teenage girl's face — the restraint-plus-intimacy template Hittman runs on 16mm.
- Beach Rats (2017) — Hittman's own prior collaboration with DP Hélène Louvart: tactile 16mm close-ups of faces and skin, slow push-ins, and performance built on withheld affect — the direct authorial precedent.
- The Wonders (2014) — Shares Louvart's soft, grainy 16mm naturalism and observational patience around a teenage girl's world — the same cinematographer's method that gives Never Rarely its handheld-intimacy palette.
- Happy as Lazzaro (2018) — Louvart's 16mm again: available-light interiors, humane close-ups, and unhurried framing of the poor and dispossessed, the collaborator's signature texture linking it to Hittman.
- Invisible Life (2019) — Another Louvart collaboration foregrounding female solidarity and women's bodily autonomy through saturated, close, tactile camerawork — the DP's method extending the same craft lineage.
- American Honey (2016) — Road journey anchored by a nonprofessional newcomer (Sasha Lane), Robbie Ryan's Academy-ratio handheld hugging her face amid economic precarity — youth-on-the-margins realism parallel to Hittman.
- Nomadland (2020) — American neorealism blending a professional lead with nonprofessionals playing themselves along a road of transient labor — the docu-fiction naturalism Hittman shares in the same season.
- The Rider (2017) — Nonprofessional newcomers enacting versions of their own lives in natural light, restraint over melodrama — the newcomer-performance ethic Hittman uses with Sidney Flanigan.
- The Florida Project (2017) — Contemporary American neorealism observing the logistics of poverty from a young protagonist's eye level, nonprofessional casting and unforced performance registering need without speeches.
- Happening (2021) — Camera locked to a young woman's body as she navigates the procedure and bureaucracy of an illegal abortion, near-wordless mounting dread and bodily restraint extending Hittman's logistics-of-need approach.
- Lingui, the Sacred Bonds (2021) — Traces the practical steps and quiet female solidarity required to obtain an abortion, dramatizing access as a chain of small obstacles rather than debate — Hittman's structure transposed.
- The Assistant (2020) — Near-wordless, procedural observation of one young woman inside an exploitative system, restraint and accumulating small tasks standing in for exposition — the same withheld-affect realism as Never Rarely.