Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Maybe it’s just me, but I am fascinated by the timing of a film whose production was not before, but in the middle of the pandemic. Until recently, most major releases, whether in theaters or on VOD or streaming, were filmed before pandemic shutdowns began—as in, most filming occurred in 2019. After a few months into the pandemic, TV and movie productions opened again, with incredibly strict COVID safety precautions, but only in recent weeks are we seeing an increased frequency of those particular productions coming up for release.

Enter Plan B, the morning-after abortion-pill-road-trip movie, streaming on Hulu as of Friday (May 28). The film is set in South Dakota, clearly in service of the premise so these two teen girls have to drive all night in search for either a pharmacy or a Planned Parenthood where they can get the pill, but it was filmed in Syracuse, New York. Principal photography occurred between September 30 and November 10 of 2020—right in the very period where national U.S. Covid cases were ramping up to their peak of the entire pandemic. Daily cases were less than their peak to date as of the start of production, but by November 10, although they had quite a ways to go to reach their true peak, they were still by then far higher by day than they ever had been up to that point.

I mention all this just to contextualize the achievement that Plan B really is. It’s well written, well acted, and well crafted—enough so that, if you didn’t know they shot it under incredibly restrictive circumstances, you’d never know the difference.

The movie, in both theme and tone, is very similar to the great 2019 film Booksmart, and it’s nearly as good (close enough, as I gave both of them the same overall grade). It’s wonderful to see this increased frequency of “teen movies” centered around young female protagonists; the more such things just seem normal as opposed to a delightful anomaly, the better off we’ll all be. And there’s a particular scene in Plan B that really amped my affection for it: when one of the girls is eating at a restaurant with her crush. She pours her heart out to him, confesses to what she feels was a huge mistake and the reason she and her friend are on this wild goose chase, and he responds with understanding and says all the right things. Not the least of them is that the idea of her being a “slut” for having sex one time is a double standard. We hear women in entertainment saying that constantly; how often do we hear it from young men?

I just love that Hunter (Michael Provost) is a good kid, nonjudgmental, and that the male sexual pursuit of women is not in any way the point of Plan B. This is a story about friendship, with the backdrop of stupid inaccessibility to birth control, abortion or family planning services in America’s heartland, where far too many states have created a scenario where women have to drive for hours just to gain access to a pill. That’s the dark framework of this story, into which directly Natalie Morales injects a story of adventure and emotional breakthroughs between friends.

Given its South Dakota setting, Plan B’s cast is surprisingly diverse: neither of the two protagonists are white; Sunny (Kuhoo Verma) is of Indian descent, and Lupe (Victoria Moroles) is from a fairly large Mexican family. Even the pharmacist who first refuses to sell Sunny the Plan B pill, on “moral grounds” is an Indian guy. The crush Lupe has her eyes on is Black, and Hunter is white. He’s also kind of impossibly cute, in the way kids of any gender often tend to be in the movies, but I also love that he’s clearly into Sunny, as opposed to the pretty little white girl she assumes he’s into. I do find myself wondering what the odds are of exactly this degree of diversity among such a group in South Dakota—which, without spoiling too much, also turns out to include a bit of queerness—but I certainly won’t question it as aspirational representation in film. There’s even a church-going Christian kid who feels a great deal of guilt about his (heterosexual) sexuality, and Morales’s narrative doesn’t treat him with any more judgment than it does any of the other kids.

In the end, the bottom line is, much like Booksmart, Plan B is consistently funny and disarmingly sweet. The teen characters are all good hearted, none of them bullies. They just make mistakes, and are far more afraid of disappointing their parents than they are afraid of each other. These are the kinds of coming-of-age stories we can always use more of.

*Getting a simple pill should never be this hard, but it makes for an entertaining comedy.*

Overall: B+