Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman, 2020)

by Elena Lazic

At first glance, Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always appears to adopt wholesale a visual style that seeks to make the viewer experience, on a visceral level, the habitat of the characters, the mood and the texture of their lives. Shot on 16mm, the film favours close-ups on faces and hands, a generally shaky camera and naturalistic performances. But from the very start, something seems to block us from fully entering the film’s world. For a long time, we cannot get a full sense of what Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) is actually like, or how she feels about her life. Whether she is at a restaurant with her family following her performance at the school concert, hanging out in her living room at home, or standing alone in front of a mirror, Autumn’s face remains almost completely impassive, her emotions barely ever bubbling up to the surface. When a doctor from the local clinic tells her that she is pregnant, Autumn seems a little stunned and upset at first, but by the time she gets home and briefly goes through the brochures she was given, she is a blank canvas again. When she then carefully heats up a safety pin in her kitchen and proceeds to pierce one of her nostrils with it in her bathroom, she acts calmly and barely winces at the pain.