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Something’s wrong with Agnes. It’s hard to pinpoint, at first. She’s got a lot going on. Agnes is smart, wicked funny, and, given she’s just been promoted to a full-time English professor at the college where she works, what you might traditionally characterize as successful. It’s the same northeastern liberal arts university where she met her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who is visiting for the weekend and to whom Agnes is supremely loyal. There’s a possible neighbors-with-benefits situation happening with the cute guy (Lucas Hedges) who lives right across the way. Her house is both adult-sized roomy and boho-student cozy. She has a cat.
But there’s also a sort of a free-floating anxiety about Agnes, along with a dash of insecurity. “Needy” is way too strong a word to describe her half of the deep friendship she shares with Lydie, yet when her bestie announces that she’s going to be mom, Agnes wants to ensure that Lydie will still love her, too. A passive-aggressive question from one of their former graduate-school peers sends her into something close to a panic attack. Lydie expresses worry over possible self-harm. The sound of wind blowing and the floorboards settling is enough to prompt her to peer outside for possible hazards, hastily locking the front door after scanning the perimeter.
As played and conceived by writer-director-star Eva Victor, Agnes is the sort of multifaceted, beautifully drawn-out protagonist you rarely see in movies, even the kind of independent ones that premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and turn their hyphenate creators into film-industry big deals almost overnight. The woman at the center of Sorry, Baby is very much like the people you see in your daily life, or perhaps staring back at you in the mirror: loving, scared, resilient, scarred, strong, spiraling, and somehow able to make it through the day intact. Had Victor, a stand-up comic and improv performer previously known for absolutely killing it on social media, simply given us a portrait of someone dealing with the thousands of tiny slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that greet most folks the minute they open their eyes in the morning, you’d still walk away from this tragicomedy feeling richer for the experience.
Except what Victor, who goes by she/they, has gifted us with is the sort of debut feature that isn’t just a showcase or a mission statement or a calling card so much as an announcement — an introduction to a gobsmacking triple-threat talent that, if you love the movies, you dream about encountering at least a few times in your life. We’re wary of smothering Sorry, Baby, a film that’s as delicate in the way it lets Agnes’ story unfold in full as it is clear-eyed and brutal about the reasons behind her fearfulness, with excessive praise. But this is exactly the kind of cinematic flag-plant that inspires such devotion, and such genuine awe. You enter the film curious about who the person behind this chronologically fractured, dangerously deadpan-witty, and occasionally devastating character study might be. You exit knowing precisely who they are, and with a perfect sense of their voice as an artist.
In the spirit of Victor’s dexterity with juggling timelines, let’s rewind. Something is indeed “wrong” with Agnes, as the first chapter — dubbed “The Year With the Baby” (Victor does love a good series of title cards) — hints at. The next chapter opens with “The Year With the Bad Thing,” which immediately warns you that you’re about to be filled in on the source of her dread, whether you like it or not. Once upon a time, Agnes and Lydie were just grad students, living together in that big house and grinding their way through thesis papers. They share an advisor, named Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi). He’s a recognizable type if you’ve spent any time among academics: harried, bookish, slightly handsome in a tweedy way, and prone to both selective flattery and being a little standoffish. Decker really loves Agnes’ thesis. Agnes loves that he loves her thesis. He gives her a first-edition copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse to borrow. Your “uh-oh” buttons feel like they’re being gently prodded through all of it.
A bad thing does indeed happen. And the way that Victor elliptically depicts it, via a series of exteriors that goes from mid-afternoon light to late-night darkness, followed by an uncomfortably long shot of Agnes simply driving, a look of disassociation on her face, speaks to their sensitivity and their economical storytelling chops. A shell-shocked monologue that then spells everything out in explicit details is enough to make you feel like you’ve been punched. A visit to a doctor, whose casual shrug at Agnes’ dazed reaction to “the bad thing” represents an entire system of patriarchal ignorance and institutional attitudes in desperate need of evolution, is equally walloping.
Yet listen to the way that Agnes and Lydie clap back at his blasé lack of a bedside manner around assault, and you can feel how Sorry, Baby is sorry/not sorry about calling out the manner in which so much of society is left unable to deal with the issue of trauma and treatment. Once the movie reveals what Agnes is dealing with, and how she’s still unable to regain a genuine sense of stability years after the incident, all of her anxiousness and apprehension feel like a natural reaction. So does the rage that accompanies it, and the need to not just forget the past but the temptation to erase yourself from the present.
Only Victor isn’t out to court easy sympathy, or make Agnes particularly relatable — the thorns still remain on the rose — or give viewers an easily digestible version of a survivor. Sorry, Baby is a movie with a trauma at its center, but it’s not a trauma drama. It’s about living with such things and still going on with your life. And the manner in which Victor presents this narrative, with such verve and confidence and tenderness and pitch-black humor, defies easy description. It’s simply an amazing display of someone knowing how to get their voice and vision across. The title itself sounds like the kind of blow-off comment some unfeeling jerk might say when you tell people you’re just trying to deal with what you didn’t ask for. Until Victor, in a truly sly move, literalizes it and gives you one last gem of a speech. You don’t know whether to laugh at the absurdity of this final scene or sob. Maybe both. That’s life. That’s this truly astounding work of art, from start to finish.
