21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Sorry, Baby' Review: Eva Victor's Story of Survival
'Sorry, Baby' is a campus comedy and a drama of how adulthood moves in, displacing friends and family and making all kinds of demands one feels ill-equipped to meet. But it is also a depiction of surviving sexual assault, the trauma at the bruised heart of a film that can be clumsy and unconvincing one moment, then smart and affecting the next. This is a directorial debut that feels like one, as wobbly as it is welcome.
Writer-director Eva Victor stars as Agnes, a young woman who teaches at a small-town college somewhere in cold, coastal New England. It begins at her modest house in the countryside, as a car pulls up and Agnes comes outside to greet her friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie). They were, we learn, graduate students at the college where Agnes still works, bonded by the misery of slogging through their theses together. Lydie has come for a visit but also to attend a dinner with some of their fellow former students, full of reminiscences both wincing and nostalgic. Most of them agree that Agnes had the easiest time of it, as someone adds, 'It wasn't her fault that Decker liked her best.' Agnes tenses, excusing herself soon after.
