Plan B Builds Sheer Delight out of a Grim Reality

The latest in the subgenre of “abortion road-trip movies” that’s flourished in the last few years, Plan B stars Kuhoo Verma as Sunny, a teenage girl who unexpectedly finds herself in need of the Plan B pill, and Victoria Moroles as Lupe, her best friend and comrade in this mission. The movie is a feature debut for director Natalie Morales and screenwriters Joshua Levy and Prathiksha Srinivasan, and hopefully the start of a prolific new chapter for all of them.

Lupe and Sunny standing at a pharmacy counter in Plan B. Brett Roedel/Hulu

Sunny and Lupe live in rural South Dakota, but initially they’re not too worried—until the local pharmacist ¨declines to offer [her] the Plan B pill,” citing a “conscience clause.” Horrified and beginning to panic, the girls start googling other options. They could order the pill from Amazon, but it wouldn’t arrive within the recommended window. The good news is that there’s a Planned Parenthood in Rapid City and it’s still the early afternoon, so they should be able to make the three-hour drive there using Sunny’s mom’s van, get the pill, and make it back without raising any suspicion. Simple, right?

Though Plan B isn’t actually about abortion, focusing instead on emergency contraception, as with the other movies in the subgenre (the much more serious Never Rarely Sometimes Always and the similarly lighthearted Unpregnant), one of its overarching themes is how disturbingly difficult it is to access reproductive health care for many, if not most, people in this country. Sunny and Lupe don’t explicitly outline the challenges that may face Sunny if she can’t access the pill, but it should be clear that if it’s this difficult to get the pill in their area, accessing an abortion could be close to hopeless. It’s impossible to get away from the idea that if we lived in a better world, the premise for this movie simply wouldn’t exist. Plan B leans into this, using its razor-sharp humor to highlight both the gravity of the situation and the bizarre ordinariness of it.

Sunny and her mother (Jolly Abraham). Brett Roedel/Hulu

The writing is phenomenal; in many scenes every single line feels like a standout, but the movie never feels crowded. No line is wasted—every moment tells us about the characters and moves the story along. Morales’s directing is a big contribution to the expert pacing of the movie, keeping the tempo from lagging where it counts while not being afraid to take her time in the more emotional character moments.

From the start, Verma is charming and relatable, but as the movie progresses her performance becomes more and more nuanced as Sunny experiences both a heightening desperation and a sinking fatalism about her situation. As with Unpregnant and Never Rarely Sometimes Always, the movie’s pacing is driven by the ticking clock of a young woman’s body, and the stakes are potentially the entire trajectory of her life. It’s Verma’s performance that drives home the intensity of those stakes in every area of her life—her goals, her relationship with her mother and struggle against her mother’s proclamation of her as a “good girl,” her crush on a boy she describes as looking like “an athletic librarian.”

Lupe and her family. Brett Roedel/Hulu

Though Sunny’s dilemma drives most of the movie’s main action, Moroles’s Lupe is much more than a sidekick. On the surface, she’s confident and wears the outward symbols of teenage rebellion—piercings, dark makeup, a vape, frequent and knowing references to sex—while rarely seeming to actually behave rebelliously, a personality type that rang true in its specificity and in Moroles’s performance. Several of the slower scenes are focused on Lupe and her feelings and fears about a secret she’s been keeping. Moroles’s presence and ability to show a precise combination of vulnerability and reserve in these scenes is highly impressive and adds another layer of depth to the movie.

Sunny and Lupe in a van during their road trip. Brett Roedel/Hulu

Sunny and Lupe are clearly each the most central person in the other’s life, with a deep well of familiarity that the movie beautifully draws on for both hilarious and moving storytelling. One of the most moving elements of Plan B is the lengths to which people will go in order to support those they care about in the ridiculously complicated and difficult process of accessing reproductive healthcare. While it is my hope—and I assume the hope of the filmmakers—that someday the movie’s premise will seem as outdated as any 20th-century plot that would be resolved in five minutes if the characters had cellphones, Plan B’s merging of comedic gold with emotional acuity will make it watchable and rewatchable far past that day.