Critics reviews

Bleak but not hopeless, gut-wrenching but not self-pitying... “Never Steady, Never Still” is a skillful, sensitively wrought portrait of moving forward despite life’s greater setbacks.

Bleak but sometimes beautiful, the performance-driven feature debut is meatier than its slender plot might suggest, with a strong sense of place and an unsentimental frankness about conditions many filmmakers would milk for sympathy.

[The film] delicately but sharply probes its characters’ lives, with nuanced depictions of exchanges that slowly bring these troubled people to better understandings of each other, and of themselves. There are traces of early Ken Loach in Hepburn’s approach, but ultimately the filmmaker’s voice, with all its frankness and plain-spokenness, is her own.

The austere beauty of Never Steady, Never Still reflects the stripped-down lives of Kathleen Hepburn’s self-contained characters, who require little and ask for less... Hepburn doesn’t demand that her characters conform to norms of sacrifice and redemption, preferring to follow Jamie and Judy’s meandering, unhurried journey to cognizance and mutual appreciation.

This film becomes a journey of trials and tribulations with as much inspirational grace as crippling resentment... And you couldn’t ask for two better performances than the ones given by Henderson and Pellerin.

There’s not enough artistic merit in Kathleen Hepburn’s film to make all its dourness worthwhile, but Henderson is excellent, and the scenes describing simple moments of compassion are poignant.

A real heartbreaker... A melancholy family drama in which Shirley Henderson delicately captures the warm heart and fortitude of her utterly believable character.

The movie comes most alive in Judy’s Parkinson’s therapy group scenes, which have a wit and punch that the rest of the film lacks... There are some heartfelt moments, but this is an opaque and frustrating experience.

You get the nagging sense that Hepburn doesn’t quite know what to do with the full-length running time. Like many mediocre arthouse films, it too often mistakes gloom and boredom for profundity and authenticity.

[Never Steady, Never Still is] a beautiful, wintry, heartfelt film, for which Hepburn has drawn from her mother’s experiences with Parkinson’s. You can feel the autobiography in a gorgeously naturalistic game of lakeside cribbage and in Henderson’s extraordinary, detailed turn.

[Hepburn's] skill behind the camera is evident as she captures the Canadian landscape with beautiful delicacy. However, the film falls apart in its subject matter, particularly its depiction of Parkinson’s. It’s glaringly obvious that Henderson is an able-bodied person playing someone with a disability, and the depiction increasingly feels exploitative. In comparison, Hepburn handles Jamie’s subplot of teenage and sexual confusion with sensitivity, proving she is more than capable of nuance.

Never Steady, Never Still offers a heart-breaking representation of grief and sadness that is left to resonate onscreen. It’s unfortunate, then, that Hepburn is unable to keep the movie on track for it to fulfil the potential that is clearly there.