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January 28, 2025It’s hard to know what to do after experiencing something traumatic. For the rest of the world, life goes on, and for the person who’s been through it, that may also be the case, but the memory doesn’t fully go away and it may also have lingering physical and psychological effects. Sorry, Baby, the impressive and intriguing feature debut from director, writer, and star Eva Victor, explores this concept through uncomfortable comedy and coping mechanisms, and the selection of worthwhile moments from five years of its protagonist’s life.
Agnes (Victor) is a professor at the same university she attended for grad school with her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie). While she’s the youngest person to become a full-time faculty member in decades, she still lives in the same house and doesn’t really go anywhere aside from work. She’s very well-regarded at the university, but she’s also still reeling from a non-consensual interaction with her thesis advisor Decker (Louis Cancelmi) that shaped her educational experience and has left her stuck, turning to her neighbor Gavin (Lucas Hedges) for comfort and closing herself off from most other people.
Victor, who has a background in comedy and appeared in the Showtime series Billions (also starring Cancelmi), makes an extraordinary, staggering debut with this film. It’s hardly a conventional take on PTSD and coping with a life-changing event, and it loves to engage with the complexities of each situation. Victor noted at the film’s Sundance premiere that it was important for her not to show any physical violence but instead to convey what Agnes has been through by how she talks about it and behaves a result. That there are so many laughs to be found in a film with sexual assault as the catalyst for its main character’s journey may be surprising to some, but it feels quite authentic and makes its story all the more engaging.
Victor and Ackie are a terrific pair whose talents shine brightest when Lydie accompanies Agnes to see a doctor with horrific bedside manner the day after the assault. They seem ready to bring down the house with their jokes even before he’s far too blunt and rude to convince anyone that he’s in the right job, and it feels like more than just a way to shield themselves from what happened. This is how they act around each other, and even experiencing something deeply devastating doesn’t change who they are at their core, though it does follow Agnes through the next few years (and certainly more, which the film doesn’t show) as simple triggers of being in the same places often send her reeling.
Blending tones is no problem for Victor, whose roles behind and in front of the camera afford her the opportunity to truly dig into Agnes and show who she is. The film’s non-linear format enables the construction of a story that’s very much about both the immediate and lasting effects of enduring something that she can’t even fully remember but knows wasn’t what she wanted. While she’s typically quick with retorts, she sometimes can’t even muster words, like when she’s told by university representatives that, while there’s nothing they can do, they understand her because, as they repeat, “we are women.” It’s a sentiment that in some ways is surely try but also rings incredibly hollow in that moment.
Victor is joined by two great actors – Ackie and Hedges – for a film that feels very intimate and selects worthwhile excerpts from Agnes’ life that are well worth watching. A sentiment expressed by Pete (John Carroll Lynch), a heavily-accented sandwich shop owner Agnes meets after experiencing a panic attack, best summarizes the effectiveness of the film’s format, which begins each chapter of sorts with a title card indicates “the year with” and some grounding event: the time since her assault is a long time in many ways and an impossibly short one in others. Sorry, Baby lives in the space in between trauma and healing, which isn’t standard or measurable. Victor is an exceptional voice whose first feature shows that she has much to say and is likely only beginning to share it with the world.
Movie Rating: 8/10