‘Plan B,’ ‘Unpregnant,’ and the Subversive Trend of the Pro-Choice Road-Trip Movie

Every so often, whatever strange magic runs Hollywood results in the coincidental release of two similar movies around the same time. Dante’s Peak and Volcano in 1997; The Illusionist and The Prestige in 2006; White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen in 2013; Goodbye Christopher Robin and Christopher Robin in 2017 and 2018, respectively. (Did we really need two sad Winnie the Pooh origin stories? It’s hard to say!)

Sometimes this phenomena is related to when certain stories enter the public domain. Sometimes it’s caused by similar screenplays being shopped at different studios at the same time. Sometimes, even, it’s the result of good ol’ industrial espionage. And sometimes these twin films arise out of a growing trend in storytelling, or a certain perspective gaining more importance and attention—like films about young women and their coming-of-age trials and tribulations. Voila: HBO Max’s Unpregnant, which was released on September 10, 2020, and Hulu’s Plan B, which was released on May 28, 2021. 

Hollywood is still a predominantly male enterprise: According to the 2021 UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report, white men are still the most represented group among film leads, and they heavily outnumber directors of different genders or ethnic groups. But as Hollywood slowly acknowledges the fact that young women go to the movies more often than men, a mini-wave of films from female filmmakers have snuck their way into arthouse theaters or onto streaming services, all making the same point. Nia DaCosta’s Little Woods, Kelly O’Sullivan’s Saint Frances, Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s Unpregnant, and Natalie Morales’s Plan B: All of them have reiterated that women’s health care in the United States is severely screwed up. 

And Unpregnant and Plan B are particularly similar—so much so that you might think you could skip Plan B if you already watched Unpregnant, or vice versa. Both films follow a pair of teenage girls on a road trip to a far-off Planned Parenthood location because their middle America hometowns have shut down these centers. (During the Trump presidency, nearly 900 women’s health clinics lost their federal funding.) They both apply gross-out humor in the vein of Greg Mottola’s Superbad and imagine the tumultuousness and loyalty of female best friendship as in Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart. And even the trailers hit similar “Look at all these wacky shenanigans!” tones: 

So: Are Unpregnant and Plan B different enough to warrant spending your time watching both? Let’s consider the evidence.

QUESTION: The high schoolers in both movies are best friends, huh? 

ANSWER: Well, the first point isn’t exactly accurate. The young women in Plan B, Kuhoo Verma’s Sunny and Victoria Moroles‘s Lupe, are in fact best friends. In their heavily white high school, the Indian-American Sunny and Latinx Lupe stand out: “Is that, like, a Mexican thing?” one of their blonde nemeses asks Lupe of her underarm hair while they’re changing for gym. But while they tell each other all kinds of secrets, Sunny and Lupe don’t tell every other everything, and a few of those surprises add some tension to Plan B. Meanwhile, in Unpregnant, Haley Lu Richardson’s Veronica and Barbie Ferreira’s Bailey are decidedly not tight. Although they were close before high school, now that they’re seniors, Veronica is part of an uptight, Christian, academically focused clique, while green-haired Brazilian-American outsider Bailey sits by herself every day during lunch. Why the childhood best friends grew apart comes up during Unpregnant, but they’re certainly more acrimonious in the beginning of the film than Sunny and Lupe, who are pretty ride or die.  

QUESTION: What are their personalities like? Are we talking Harold and Kumar, Seth and Evan, or Amy and Molly?

ANSWER: There are components from all three of those duos in these pairs, and the character dynamics between each film are similar. Sunny in Plan B and Veronica in Unpregnant are overachievers with strict parents who find themselves unexpectedly needing the Plan B pill and an abortion, respectively. Meanwhile, Lupe and Bailey are each more uninhibited and spontaneous—like they watched Fairuza Balk in The Craft and internalized her whole vibe—and they’re the friends who volunteer to drive Sunny and Veronica to Planned Parenthood. Sunny and Veronica, both being super Type A, organize their secret road trips down to the last detail, while Lupe and Bailey’s impulsiveness derails each plan. 

QUESTION: And each film includes a road trip?

ANSWER: Yup! More somber films about abortion road trips already exist in the form of Little Woods, in which Tessa Thompson and Lily James’s half-sisters travel from North Dakota to Canada, and Never Rarely Sometimes Always, in which Sidney Flanigan and Talia Ryder’s cousins travel from Pennsylvania to New York City. But Plan B and Unpregnant both put a buddy-comedy spin on the very dire reality that getting birth control, emergency contraceptives, or abortions as a minor is hella difficult in the U.S., in particular in the states where Sunny and Veronica live (South Dakota and Missouri, respectively). Once Sunny impulsively rebels against her mother’s “good girl” expectations and loses her virginity, she tries to get the Plan B pill from a local pharmacist—who rejects her because of the “conscience clause” that allows him to refuse treating her. With nowhere else to turn, she and Lupe head off to the hours-away Rapid City so they can visit Planned Parenthood. A similar obstacle faces Victoria in Unpregnant when she learns that she needs parental consent to schedule an abortion—a rule not only in her home state of Missouri, but also in nearby Illinois, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. The closest place Victoria can receive care is Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is practically an odyssey away, and the only person she knows with a car is Bailey. 

QUESTION: What kind of hijinks go down? Awkward sexual encounters? Accidental drug use? Gen Z struggling to read paper maps? 

ANSWER: Yes, obviously! All of those things! These are teen comedies! They’re both funny! Both movies make sure to add some levity to the desperate situations in which the protagonists find themselves. Prathi Srinivasan and Joshua Levy’s Plan B script is consistently, wonderfully vulgar, with jokes about anal sex and masturbation and Sunny and Lupe’s emphatic rejection of their classmates’ casual racism. The film really goes for gross-out moments, and the best include a drug dealer with an unexpected phallic accessory and a drug-fueled homage to zombie movies. Unpregnant doesn’t get as lewd as Plan B, but it amuses by giving Ferreira’s Bailey a variety of bemused reactions to Veronica’s crappy boyfriend Kevin (Alex MacNicoll) and by incorporating a high-speed chase scene in which Bailey and Veronica try to flee from a crisis pregnancy center RV. Unpregnant doesn’t have as clear or as sharp of a comedic sensibility as Plan B, which might be because of its five credited writers (Goldenberg, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, William Parker, and Ted Caplan and Jenni Hendricks, who wrote the book on which the film is based). But taking ‘90s skater-kid cutie Breckin Meyer and crafting him into a pro-life zealot is a creative point in Unpregnant‘s favor. 

QUESTION: These movies sound a lot alike. Do I really need to watch both?

ANSWER: Well, don’t we watch movies that are a lot alike all the time? The Hangover and The Hangover Part II were basically the exact same movie. The many, many entries in the long-running action franchises The Fast and the Furious and Mission: Impossible are all variations on a recurring theme, with a certain set of component parts, characters, and general narrative arc. Is it really such a bad thing that two movies in this limited pro-choice road-trip subgenre share some similarities? The parallels between Plan B and Unpregnant don’t diminish the fantastically lively performances from Verma and Moroles in the former, or from Richardson and Ferreira in the latter. They don’t lessen the hilarity of the appreciably revolting moment in Plan B when Sunny’s mom investigates an intimate body piercing, or the satisfaction in Unpregnant when Veronica uses a Taser to defend Bailey after realizing the depths of their friendship. And the films’ resemblances certainly don’t erase the valid point both films are making about the absurd difficulties women face in this country when it comes to receiving the health care they need. “I know I made the right choice for me,” one of these young women says, and the right choice for you would be to watch both Plan B and Unpregnant.

Roxana Hadadi is a film, television, and pop culture critic whose bylines include Pajiba, The A.V. Club, RogerEbert.com, Crooked Marquee, GQ, Polygon, Vulture, and Bright Wall/Dark Room. She holds an MA in literature and lives outside Baltimore, Maryland. She is a member of the DC Area Film Critics Association, the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, and the Online Film Critics Society, and is a Tomatometer Top Critic on Rotten Tomatoes.

Watch Plan B on Hulu

Watch Unpregnant on HBO Max