Never Rarely Sometimes Always

Haven't been this immediately compelled to write a truly serious review in a long time, but nothing has utterly transfixed me to this extent for a long time. This entire film, moreso than most, feels like recalling an event in your distant memory - anything purposeless is cut out, all that remains is intent. All that remains is the feeling, the tiny moments that created that feeling occasionally creeping back to overpower the event itself. There's no melodrama, no central explicit conflict, just constant movement towards a payoff which is eventually reached, but which ebbs and flows like the rest of the film has without an ego. And I feel like this is one of the things that films which deal with abortion, need to understand: it's a form of healthcare. Like all healthcare, it's a neutral fact of life which many people experience at some point, and for most it will ebb and flow with the same predictability as the intermediary trips to bowling or bearing witness to your cousin's new almost-relationship. Everything in the film is neutral, viewed objectively for what it is, and yet somehow confidently personalised at the same time. Autumn as a character is a personification of this, of the inherent neutrality of much of human life. The rationale behind most of her decisions is left unsaid, but not difficult to decipher: further reiterating the overall feeling that this is not a film in the at least semi-escapist traditional sense, but a series of clips within the mind of somebody you know but rarely think about, whose inner life rarely occurs to you. There's minimal ego to our protagonist, beyond a desire to maintain life without the inevitable crushing responsibility of motherhood, and yet that namesake scene still hits like a ton of bricks in its brave mundanity. Real human life isn't a fairy tale. It's a constant continuum of events which you can try to control, but exerting this control is also made infinitely harder when the world decides that you don't have the money, or the gender, or the agency for this control, your autonomy lost in federal laws and arbitrary standards and judgement. This film understands the horror of this through the fact that nothing is presented as horror. Nothing is dramatic and yet everything is. I hope somebody is letting Eliza Hittman make another film, for slightly more money, as we speak.