Eva Victor does it all in tragicomic character study Sorry, Baby

Yahoo

24-06-2025

Sorry, Baby and its central figure, literature student-turned-professor Agnes (played by writer-director Eva Victor), form the lever that pivots around the film's invisible fulcrum, an unseen sexual assault. Broken up into five nonlinear chapters and multiple seasons spent over the course of years in the same New England college town, the memoir-like debut is as delightful as it is momentarily harrowing—that a story about post-traumatic dissociation and recovery is this funny and charming is a minor miracle. Its fragmented literary structure and Victor's captivating lead turn cohere theme, form, and content, melding the elliptical episodes into a canny representation of memory.
Victor's script does this by preventing the assault from defining Agnes' life. It's still an event heavy enough to influence the orbit of everything that followed it, and to make that which led up to it seem like an inevitable march towards doom, but life goes one. Keeping with general relativity, though, Agnes' assault alters time and space. Vignettes move faster or slower depending on their proximity to it, and its taint poisons buildings, if not entire towns. This is all done elegantly: Hours leap in a blink, while an unbroken tracking shot captures the kind of absurd little details that calcify into long-term memory. Victor's tics and flinches signal how innocuous items, articles of clothing, or even specific words, can simply be ruined by someone. But, stuck as Agnes may appear to be, living in the same house and teaching at the same institution at which she finished her studies, she's not trying to escape. There's a stubbornness and bravery to her persistence, unspoken but not unappreciated by those around her.
This speaks to the depth with which this community is drawn, whether that's in the cozy images of friendship that open the Sorry, Baby—as Agnes' ride-or-die ex-roommate Lydie (Naomi Ackie) cuddles up under light as warm as the pair's chunky-knit blankets and thick socks—the excellent teddy-bear turn by John Carroll Lynch, or the scene-stealing thorn in Agnes' side, her hilariously severe, one-sided departmental rival played by Kelly McCormack. There's a mannered specificity to the writing that not only applies to Agnes (kind of a pain, awkward, wry, silly, and putting Victor's lankiness to great use), but their entire academic bubble. The same lived-in familiarity that sets Ackie and Victor up for success, with their shorthand lingo between besties, has a dark shadow when applied to the professional sphere—one cast by Agnes' mentor Decker (Louis Cancelmi, who played a relentlessly evil murderer in Killers Of The Flower Moon and here finds yet another alluring angle to his sinister good looks), who teaches their crop of grad students and whose entire divorced being is a red flag.
Yet this telegraphing doesn't feel false. Some things you can just see a mile away. The imperfect emotions driving Agnes and those around her are just as honest as the bitter, ridiculous aftermath of her assault, both logistical (criminally, professionally, medically) and psychological. Lia Ouyang Rusli's sparsely deployed, piano-driven score offers only brief respites from the film's reality, and Victor, in both excruciating speeches and snappy one-liners, traps you in their script. Their performance, with its realistic patter and rhythm, gives both the melancholy and the riffing an air of ease—even when driven by discomfort or seeming to escape from the mouth of a person who doesn't know how else to communicate. Only occasionally is the script too stiff or overwritten, consciously straining for a gag and undermining its understatements.
The best moments of Sorry, Baby, which is most of Sorry, Baby, bloom beneath this subtlety. A low-key shooting style, contained and with a not-quite-depressive sameness where days easily fade into night, allows plenty of space for consideration, for mid-movie mullings of Agnes' fling with her oblivious soft-boy neighbor (Lucas Hedges) or her students' reaction to Lolita. It's a movie that wanders the house, stretches in the sunlight, balances energetic freak-outs with endearing lethargy; Sorry, Baby is cat cinema long before an excellent kitten enters the picture. And like a cat, or a painful old memory that's long scarred over, it's a film that lingers around you in the middle of the night, demanding to be sat with despite the danger of drawing blood, both disruptive and strangely reassuring.
Director: Eva Victor Writer: Eva Victor Starring: Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, John Carroll Lynch, Louis Cancelmi, Kelly McCormack Release Date: June 27, 2025
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