Sorry, Baby review – a warm, bitingly funny refocus of the trauma plot

19 hours ago 4

By now, a full week into Sundance, it is clear that the indie film festival is in a bit of a slump. While the Utah fest boasts an impressive and impassioned slate of documentaries this year – I haven’t seen a dud yet, and I’ve seen many – the narrative offerings have mostly fizzled on impact. Plenty of beautiful shots and atmospheric vibes, aimless plot and unearned yearning.

Which made the premiere of Sorry, Baby, comedian Eva Victor’s feature debut as a writer-director, an especially brisk breath of fresh air on Monday night. Sharply written, smartly structured and well-acted, with a star-making turn from Victor herself, the 93-minute black comedy is not only nimble and consistently funny, but one of the best, most honest renderings of life after sexual assault that I’ve seen.

Honest, in that its interest is just that: life after, not the event itself, which has unfortunately been given gravitational weight in so many other handlings of the subject post #MeToo. Sorry, Baby reconfigures the settings of the now de rigueur trauma plot, which tends to give the Bad Thing annihilating force, wringing suspense and purpose out of the question of what happened to her, or the reveal of very bad men. Trauma as totalizing identity, downward spiral, expected element.

Something bad did happen to Agnes (Victor), an English professor at a Bowdoin-esque college in rural New England (filming took place in Ipswich, Massachusetts). Her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) alludes to it in the film’s first of four chapters, titled The Year With the Baby, with the trailed off vagueness of the lived and understood. Agnes’s life has inched forward while Lydie’s has galloped – Agnes lives in the same house as grad school, teaches in the same program, now has His office; Lydie is married and building a family in the city. But it’s one concerned note of many in their reunion, which the two actors perform with irresistible intimacy across believable beats: catching up, physical closeness, the big questions and validations, the interruption of a neighbor (Lucas Hedges) that Agnes may or may not be fucking. Hints of depression, but the predominant tone is joy – the thrill of being with the one person for whom you can drop all facades (and also, a welcome rebuttal to the idea that friendship necessarily wanes post-partnership).

That sensibility – lightness shaded by the past, consistent jolts of deadpan humor – helpfully frames the film’s return to the event itself, a few years earlier (I am personally pleased that Sorry, Baby has a solid grasp on its timeline). Back then, Agnes and Lydie were roommates in the same grad program, Lydie the charming slacker to Agnes’s top student, who receives special, talent-affirming attention from their adviser Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi). Teacher and student text and flirt and express mutual admiration; Lydie jokes they should just have sex, Agnes demurs. Victor finds an inventive method to avoid depicting the bad thing while still conveying the time elapsed and the wordless shock after.

But it’s thankfully not a mystery, to leak out over time; Agnes tells Lydie in believable specificity what happened – a fully convincing performance of mutating shock from Victor, and of empathy from Ackie – and Lydie confirms, yeah, that is the thing. These are not naive women. They summarily embark on all the necessary decisions – go to the hospital? Go to the police? Report to the department? Agnes proceeds as many do, with a destabilizing mix of denial, doubt and furious certainty, which Victor renders with aching specificity and bristling humor reminiscent of Fleabag (it helps that Victor, a willowy brunette, also resembles Phoebe Waller-Bridge).

Victor has a deft and refreshing handle on the absurd situations, unnerving ironies and forced inevitability of moving forward, how sexual assault can shred one’s self-confidence but not destroy you. Agnes is still smart and funny and endearing, able to build a teaching career and new, tentative relationships; she is also haunted by a bad experience inseparable from her career. Sometimes you think about and feel the lure of the abyss; other times, as she says in one especially poignant scene with an acquaintance played by John Carroll Lynch, you don’t think about it at all. Life goes on.

Certain elements of Sorry, Baby are dialed up a little too high – an uncaring experience at the doctor’s office exaggeratedly callous in a way we’ve seen before, a jealous and socially awkward work rival (Kelly McCormack) a shade too intense for the film’s rare, delicate naturalism. But without sensationalism or over-statement characteristic of the nascent genre, Victor brilliantly illustrates the experience of aftermath in its mundanity, its small joys, its pain, its strange companionships. In particular, the great tragedy of what he did: to have such disrespect braided into praise of her intelligence, her worth, erodes her faith in it. It may be impossible to fully recover. But she has her best friend, her wit, her stubborn persistence, time. Her life, rendered with such layered complexity that Sorry, Baby should become a breakout of this festival.