Call me a sucker. I totally admit it: Plan B is a movie I am almost genetically predisposed to love. I love teen coming-of-age movies. Booksmart, Eighth Grade, Lady Bird — all made my Best of the Year lists. And I love road trip movies too! Ida and Magic Mike XXL both made my Best Movies of the 2010s list. Bring those genres together well and, sure, you’ve got something that I’m probably going to enjoy. And I’m a child of the 80s, so I grew up with the end of the era of raunchy sex comedies. Plan B brings those back, too.
And you know what? I did enjoy Plan B. It’s got some issues for sure. It is, after all, simultaneously a sweet coming-of-age story, a raunchy R-rated comedy, a social issues story, and a road trip buddy flick. Those don’t always sit comfortably next to one another.
And yet, there’s a good chance it makes my year-end list. And there’s an even better chance it becomes a movie I rewatch regularly. So, again: Call me a sucker. It’s fair. But Plan B is doing something I love and it’s doing it really well. Sometimes, the old favorites still land right.
“If your vagina was a car, what would it be?”
Sunny (Kuhoo Verma) is a good Indian-American girl. She’s smart, she’s dedicated, and she’s everything her driven, successful mother wants her to be. She is also horny as hell, specifically for Hunter (Michael Provost), a lanky classmate with a laid-back sense of cool that appeals to shy, nervous Sunny. Thankfully, her good friend Lupe (Victoria Moroles), a rebellious Latina goth who spars constantly with her pastor father, is there to push her to try new things. Specifically, to throw a party — and to invite Hunter. And as a bonus, Lupe can invite her own crush, a long-distance lover named Logan who Sunny has never met.
The party goes well and plenty of kids show up. But Lupe’s crush, Logan, doesn’t. And Hunter leaves early with the popular-but-bitchy Megan. Distraught, drunk, and horny, Sunny sleeps with a random guy at the party — only to find that the condom malfunctioned, leaving her unprotected and terrified of pregnancy. Together, Lupe and Sunny try to buy a Plan B pill from the local pharmacist, who refuses for religious reasons. This leaves them with just one option: Drive to the nearest Planned Parenthood, a few hours away in Rapid City, before the 24-hour window in which Plan B is most effective passes.
“A Ferrari — it stays covered up and completely unused in the garage.”
Kuhoo Verma is that rare delight in modern film: A newcomer. Outside of a bit part in The Big Sick, it’s unlikely that you’ve encountered Verma anywhere. Hopefully, Plan B will fix that, because… well, she’s funny as fuck. Sunny is a complicated character for a variety of reasons. First, we’ve seen a hundred variations on her: The overachiever who breaks the mold but gets in over her head. Hell, both leads of Booksmart mined that archetype. And second, it’s a messy archetype! As a nerdy kid with a lot of social anxiety, breaking that is hard. Changing yourself, stepping out of your comfort zone even for one night… it’s tough! Movies like this run the risk of having the change feel passive, like something is being done to them, or making the character an incoherent mess.
But Kuhoo Verma walks that familiar line comfortably. The anxiety of an unmedicated overachiever never disappears, giving her an edge that holds the character’s big swings together. She’s got excellent comic timing and the flexibility to roll with a characterization that might otherwise feel sloppy. As with any road trip comedy, she’s put in a lot of very weird situations where she is forced to react to bizarre and unexpected circumstances. Verma’s charisma lets her vacillate between some pretty wild tones — awkward sex comedy can morph into warm emotionality in a heartbeat in this movie — and she holds it together perfectly. It’s a great performance from an unknown actress.
Also excellent is Teen Wolf alum Victoria Moroles as Lupe. Moroles’ character is more familiar in modern movies like Blockers, a queer kid who isn’t really out to anyone in her life and doesn’t know how to make that transition. There is some added concern here, given that the film is set in rural America, where queerness is considerably more dangerous. And yet Moroles plays Lupe with a devil-may-care charm that should position her as a breakout star. ‘The Outgoing Friend Who Pushes the Lead to Try New Things’ is, again, well-trodden territory — think Jonah Hill in Superbad or Beanie Feldstein in Booksmart. Lupe is more sensitive than either, giving Moroles a lot more to play around with. She absolutely destroys every scene she’s in. Like Geraldine Viswanathan in Blockers, she has a brash, confident allure that masks an appealing vulnerability. It’s a great performance.
“Mine would definitely be a Transformer. You think you know her, boom, Autobots pop out.”
The core emotional beats of teen coming-of-age movies are always pretty similar. Think of them like set-pieces in an action movie. The awkward sexual encounter, the crush who isn’t as they appear, trying drugs for the first time, the breaking point of the core relationship and its eventual reconciliation — these (and other tropes) come up over and over again. And yet the genre stays fresh, in part because of the way these movies build themselves around different core conflicts. In Lady Bird, Christine seeks to escape a home she hates, only to find the value in it after she’s gone. In Booksmart, two codependent friends find that separate longterm goals force them to redefine their friendship. And in The Edge of Seventeen, Nadine has to confront the self-loathing that her fear of abandonment pushed her to develop.
Plan B, likewise, finds its own spin on the formula. It is about the expectations placed upon Sunny and Lupe by their parents and the boundaries they have to set up to become their own people. As two women of color with single parents, both deal with an exorbitant amount of pressure from their parents to be better, to be perfect, to excel. What is the process of growing up, of rebelling, when you also recognize that your parent has some understanding of the dangers you’ll face? When they just want to keep you safe in a world that will demand so much more from you than it will give?
The script, from iZombie writers Prathiksha Srinivasan and Joshua Levy, makes this conflict feel lived-in the way the best teen movies do. One running joke sees Sunny freak out every time she sees another Indian person on her adventure, worried that the ‘Indian Mafia’ will somehow report back to her mother. It’s a great running gag with a good payoff. But it also finds something new and fun to say about the lives of a minoritized community in a place as white as the Midwest.
“I feel like if you’re following the metaphor, that means you have crabs.”
Plan B is a reminder of the human cost of laws that limit reproductive healthcare. You can argue about the limits of empathy, but I do think it’s important to remember that decisions we make have real consequences. Politics is not a game and it’s not a sport. It has life-changing ramifications for real human beings.
Plan B is also, thankfully, funny as fuck. It’s not a lecture. Sure, it reflects a reality a lot of movies don’t want to discuss. But it does so with humor and humanity, with vulgarity and sensitivity. These elements don’t always fit neatly together, but, despite it all, it never falters. Director Natalie Morales has worked on some of TV’s best comedies — as an actor. Perhaps that’s why she understands that the right cast can hold it together. And she absolutely found the right cast, here.
Plan B is, like a lot of coming-of-age comedies, a novel spin on a basic story. But between its leads, its direction, and its script, it finds the humor amidst the darkness. That ended up feeling surprisingly meaningful, particularly in 2021.