Sorry, Baby is a movie about rape, but it painstakingly does not show us the action that defines its story. An indirect approach like this can be frustrating and elliptical, but first-time writer-director Eva Victor (who also stars in the film) does tremendous things with it, so much so that it may be the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. It opens at the AMC theaters at Grapevine Mills and the Parks at Arlington this weekend, and it’s worth the trip just to see how scene after scene in this remarkable debut film hits its target.
Victor portrays Agnes Ward, an English lit graduate student in a college town that is just begging to be called “quaint.” (And “bucolic,” too. The movie was shot in Massachusetts.) The film is divided into five chapters that are told out of order, but the story begins with the second chapter, “The Year with the Bad Thing.” A professor named Decker (Louis Cancelmi) asks to meet Agnes in his house to discuss her thesis about short stories. As she enters his home, the camera stays unmoving on the sidewalk across the street from the house, and all we hear are the noises from the street from mid-morning until late that night, when Agnes leaves without a word. Immediately afterward, the camera stays mounted to her car on a shell-shocked Agnes’ face as she drives home. The professor resigns mere hours after the attack.
Victor is the 31-year-old non-binary filmmaker who previously acted on many episodes of TV’s Billions and uses they/them pronouns. (Agnes does not specify her pronouns, but when a jury questionnaire asks her gender, she fills in both the “F” bubble and an unprovided third bubble between the “F” and the “M.”) Maybe even more than Materialists, this movie has some of the most exquisite dialogue I’ve heard lately, like in an early scene in Decker’s office where Agnes banters with him about his unsuccessful first novel that nevertheless touched her. Her bisexual British roommate Lydie (Naomi Ackie) turns out to be the best friend you could wish for in this situation, and when Agnes tells her about Decker’s penis being inside her for a few seconds, Lydie says, “That sounds like that. This is that thing.”
The only person who says the word “rape” is the incredibly insensitive campus doctor (Marc Carver) who examines Agnes after she reports a sexual assault and plows straight through Lydie’s objections to his tone. If that scene feels like somebody lived through it, that’s even truer of the following bit, when two university administrators (Liz Bishop and Natalie Rotter-Laitman) tell Agnes that they can’t do anything about Decker while robotically repeating the same mantra: “We know what you’re going through. We are women.” Later, in a chapter entitled “The Year with the Questions,” Agnes explains why she didn’t go to the police: “I want [Decker] not to be a guy who did this. If I go to the police, he’ll be a guy who did this who’s in jail.”
If I’m making this sound grim, you should know that Victor cuts this with a great deal of leavening humor, including a bit that displays their talent for physical comedy when Agnes picks up a stray kitten outside a grocery store and then tries to hide the animal under her coat while shopping. Kelly McCormack is blisteringly funny as a bitter and envious fellow grad student who constantly tries to get Decker’s attention, and years later sends Agnes into a panic attack when she casually admits to having had sex with the prof. Lucas Hedges — where’s he been lately? — drops in, too, as a neighbor whose interactions with Agnes remain awkward even after they start having sex. (“I’m having dinner with my mother. That’s not true. I made that up to close myself off from the possibility of rejection.”)
Agnes borrows lighter fluid from that neighbor because she’s seized by a sudden urge to set Decker’s vacated office on fire, and when she’s alone in her house, she becomes so spooked that she takes pages from her thesis and tapes them over a window. The trauma rolls on even while funny things happen to her and her friends get on with their lives. The title Sorry, Baby comes from the quietly wrenching concluding scene, when Agnes is alone with Lydie’s baby girl and apologizes to her for all the bad things that will happen to her. We could do better for our girls by telling them that early on, or we could just show them this movie when they get a bit older.
Sorry, Baby
Starring Eva Victor and Naomi Ackie. Written and directed by Eva Victor. Rated R.
