When Sorry, Baby began to generate buzz among critics and the types of people who follow movie distributor acquisitions, a friend texted me a link to a review with a caption she’d added: “sundance (derogatory).” And, sure—a low-budget feature from a writer-director about a character who suffers a tragedy in her college town could be the logline for any number of eminently forgettable titles that have come through Sundance over the decades.
But Eva Victor’s debut, which was produced by Barry Jenkins and acquired by A24 for a reported $8 million after its Park City premiere, confounds whatever expectations might come with those superficial similarities. At once funnier and more deservedly harrowing than nearly any script of its type, Sorry, Baby makes a convincing argument that the most mundane, prescribed parts of adult life are not so much “sad” or “difficult” or “profound” as they are actually extremely fucked up.
Victor, a 31-year-old comrade from the trenches of digital media, stars as Agnes, who, at the beginning of the slightly nonlinear story, has just begun a professorship at the school where she did her graduate work. In fact, she still lives in the same house where she once resided as a student with her best friend and former roommate, Lydie (Naomi Ackie). Victor is a staggering performer: Imagine if the Frances Ha leads were much smarter and more self-aware, a little bit evil, and lived in something resembling the real world. There are microexpressions—almost imperceptible reactions that communicate pain or joy—that are not aimed at the camera, but don’t seem intended for anyone else, either. Agnes is socially competent, even charismatic, but beset by neuroses that seem genuinely frustrating to her, not the self-satisfied post-Woody Allen solipsism common to auteurs of this ilk. The way Victor reads on camera—brilliant but a little bumbling, at turns sturdy and too vulnerable to live—is exactly how the characters’ friends receive her.
When Lydie comes back to visit, she delays the news of her pregnancy until she’s about to leave. This is not out of fear that Agnes will be jealous Lydie is having a child, but fear that Agnes will be anxious about her friend pulling her further away. Of course, she is anxious. But again, this is not a film about someone who’s treated as a freak or a pet; Agnes is simply a little bit raw at the moment, able and caring enough to center her excitement for Lydie. And still, when she gets into her car to drive back to the city, Lydie looks up at an Agnes who looks physically ill at the thought of abandonment.
We’re to understand that while some of this maladjustment is native to Agnes, more is attributed to the aftershock of a Terrible Event. And while Sorry, Baby doesn’t explicate what that event is until its second act, it makes little attempt at misdirection: Agnes was sexually assaulted by her grad school advisor, a seemingly sweet, nervous author named Decker (the improbably named Louis Cancelmi). It’s ordinary, it’s brutal; there is an essay to be written about the proliferation of films and books about sexual abuse in these institutions as a metacommunication about the dimensions and texture of the problem.
Sorry, Baby moves deftly between tones, not only from scene to scene, but within discrete conversations. (One exchange Agnes has with her neighbor-slash-occasional lover, Gavin—a winning, overqualified Lucas Hedges—conveys the implication of violence and high-rom-com chemistry without stopping to belabor either.) Its greatest sleight of hand is in its depiction of the assault and its aftermath. After a logistical snafu ends their initial meeting about Agnes’ thesis, Decker makes the casual suggestion that the makeup session be at his house near campus. Agnes can’t balk at this without seeming (to use the appropriately gendered word) hysterical; Decker has also been nothing but earnest and warm to her thus far, to the point where Lydie has joked about their relationship. And so she walks up the stairs to his porch. We see her take off her boots, we see her enter.
And that’s it. What follows is a static shot of Decker’s house where, as afternoon turns to evening, we presume Agnes is the victim of some sort of sexual violence. When she finally leaves, she doesn’t exactly flee: She puts on her boots hastily, leaving them untied, but does not run. Decker watches from the doorway, his hands on his hips, stiff, still. Now, at once, the camera follows as Agnes hurries across town in a daze.
That indirect depiction is followed immediately, however, by a scene at the house Agnes still shares with Lydie. She sits in the bathtub, evidently numb, recounting what just happened. The story is halting, its end inevitable; it’s also couched in self-doubt, second-guessing, disbelief. While the scene is rendered in a mostly unbroken shot, it’s a showcase for Victor the actor rather than Victor the director. Aside from accommodating Ackie’s remarkably layered performance, the reverse shots keep the viewer’s mind from wandering toward the filmmaking technique, and allow it to be fully immersed in what’s happening on screen. Which is to say: horror.
Victor wrote Sorry, Baby after nearly a decade of open discussion about not only the prevalence of sexual abuse but the insufficiency of our responses to it, including from those who are supposed to be helpful and sympathetic. Just as the conversation outside of Gavin’s house contains an impressive knot of tones, Victor shows, in the wake of Agnes’ assault, the apparent confidence of a writer who trusts her audience. The women from the university who tell her there’s nothing to be done are not necessarily meant to stand in for All Women, and the judge who excuses her from the jury pool in an unrelated case is less a stand-in for Justice than a colorful side character. Over and over, Victor argues for the emotional experience of suffering, that recovering from terrible trauma is genuinely complicated. There are no pairs of tidily poetic contradictions, but a morass of inner conflict, uncertainty, pain, and relief.
A cat appears as a symbol of displaced emotional energy, then simple love, then a more complicated sort of companionship; John Carroll Lynch pops up as a sandwich shop owner who’s a bit of a sage. By the time we arrive at Sorry, Baby’s coda—in which Agnes is made to confront the literal baby Lydie’s has with a partner who’s clearly leery of Agnes—the optimism Agnes projects onto the child, and the pledges she makes to it, feel not like platitudes, but rather like talismans handed down from someone who has seen what is unspeakably ugly—and lived, because there’s nothing else to do.