There are no ‘right’ answers in Eva Victor’s semi-autobiographical debut Sorry Baby, a story about adult friendships, stagnant lives, career quandaries, and how we choose to speak to one another, all orbiting the central force of a sexual assault that haunts the narrative and its characters even as they work to have it not define them. It’s a moving yet quiet first film from Victor, one that serves as a remarkable showcase for her in all three roles – director, writer, star – as it dedicatedly avoids cliches and fetishised trauma, slipping between the light and the dark of recovery.
Victor plays Agnes, an idiosyncratic academic living alone in rural New England in a slightly creepy old house near her university campus. We first meet her a few years after the assault (called just ‘The Bad Thing’ within the film), as she’s visited by her best friend Lydie (Naomie Ackie), who announces that she’s pregnant. Though it is joyous news, Agnes can barely contain her panic; children are the main way adult friends lose touch, and Lydie is a vital support structure in Agnes’s otherwise too-silent life. Sorry Baby is full of these insights into grown-up relationships and the way people come to terms with falling down the priority lists of those with whom they were once inseparable, and Victor and Ackie’s rapport is both gigglingly lovely and unshakeably sad.
After this segment, we then flash back to before The Bad Thing, with Agnes and Lydie together in grad school, this time both living in Agnes’s old house (this mix of timeline shenanigans and unchanging locations makes for effective formal shorthand for the way rape both fractures and freezes a life). Victor avoids any sort of sensationalism when it comes to the event itself, and the aftermath is written exceptionally well.
Sorry Baby feels quietly revolutionary in the way it talks about and around sexual assault, sympathetic characters conveying their understanding mostly through pauses and silence while useless/malicious authority figures talk directly but unhelpfully. Emotional catharsis never really arrives – this isn’t the kind of film with a big breakthrough ‘time to cry now’ scene, though a chance encounter with a kindly sandwich shop owner played by John Carroll Lynch comes close. There aren’t many actors better at seeming like the safest man in the world than Lynch, and the scene also captures that specific yet underdiscussed magic of unloading your burdens onto a stranger who is under no obligation to retain them; Agnes never tells her neighbour-turned-boyfriend Gavin (Lucas Hedges) what has happened to her.
It also helps that Sorry Baby allows itself to be funny – this little corner of New England that Victor has created is packed with amusing people with odd social manners, severe faces, and strangely old-fashioned names. Generally with films of this subject matter, something along the lines of ‘devastating’ is the critical buzzword they’re looking for; Sorry Baby is not one of those films. This is a more grounded and reserved tale and, mostly, all the better for it.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 