Sorry, Baby

dir: Eva Victor

2025

Eva Victor wrote the screenplay, directs the film, and stars as the main character. I’m guessing they have some random connection to the story…

I shouldn’t be glib. This is a pretty serious story, dealt, dare I say it, with a light and humorous touch, and it’s not just about the terrible thing it’s about. It’s also about friendship, and how those relationships (just as important if not more so than ‘romantic’ ones) change over time, and need to change regardless of all the reasons we don’t want them to.

And it’s mostly about our odd main character, Agnes (Eva Victor). As the story opens she’s greeting her dearest friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) who is in town just to visit her. This is several years after they both did grad studies at this particular, small liberal arts college (I’m guessing somewhere in New England), one that Lydie has moved away from, and that Agnes is still entrenched in.

Amidst their catching up, and the kinds of goofy carry-ons that only long time intense friends have, there is concern on Lydie’s part, and continuous, unconvincing reassurance on Agnes’ part, that she’s okay, she’s not trapped, she’s not suicidal, it’s okay. They dance around The Bad Thing that must have happened to her, but not for too long, because it’s important to let us know what the Bad Thing was that happened to Agnes, that now colours many aspects of her life, so that it doesn’t become a distraction that they keep being mysterious about it.

The film is separated into chapters based on particular years that don’t follow chronologically, but the film does start and end in the same year, the Year of the Baby. It then jumps back to the Year with the Bad Thing, and the years that followed, and then it’s back to where the flick gets its title from, being Agnes apologising to an actual baby.

I feel like… maybe the chapter titles are a not-so-subtle allusion to David Foster Wallace, since Agnes is a lecturer in Modern American Literature, and though I doubt she has Infinite Jest on her syllabus, at least none of the chapters was titled The Year of the Chewable Ambien Tab or the like. Could be a bit of a reach, on my part. But it wouldn’t be out of line with the environment, seeing as it’s people who voluntarily immerse themselves in the cozy, smothering world of academia, with its attendant pitfalls and pretentious prats.

If you went to uni, and especially if you lived on campus, the vibes of these kinds of college set stories (though this is not to be confused with the “college novel” genre, like Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Bret Easton Ellis’ early novels before he tried to hide his proximity from the closet by making everything about murder from American Psycho onwards) are familiar. Universities are absurd places. Plus, if you were there for any length of time, you either experienced sexual assault, had friends who survived it (or didn’t), or, in the least likely category if you’re ever reading one of my reviews, you committed it. Statistically speaking, three likely options, many horrible outcomes.

Agnes, in the Year with the Bad Thing, is raped by her professor. Before that happens, when she’s receiving feedback on her thesis, and he uses the word “extraordinary” to describe a passage of her writing, her whole face, her whole being lights up. It’s as pure a joy as we’re ever likely to see expressed in our lives, on film.

Years later, when she’s getting the job as a full time employee of the university, and the faculty head uses the word “extraordinary” amidst the recommendations and references they received on Agnes’ behalf, it’s like a light in her soul has been switched off, with light draining from her face accordingly. Did you ever consider that such an experience could make you hate, or dread, such a commonplace word?

Agnes is eloquent, and articulate, but she’s not necessarily ready to express what she needs or wants to express, and her changing proximity to the event doesn’t change the impact it has on how she feels about herself or her other relationships. She often feels like her house isn’t safe, isn’t secured. Someone could come in whenever they feel like it, or at least that’s what it feels like. When you no longer feel like you have bodily autonomy, or that you don’t completely have a say as to who has access to your body or not, it can’t help but change how you view the world.

And of course she has Lydie’s support, and that is great and much appreciated, but the absurd interactions she has with medical staff and the uni’s HR people are only going to make things worse. Those interactions are played kinda for laughs, in that the doctor (male) is shown as being proficient with the process of how they’re meant to treat patients who’ve been sexually assaulted, but oblivious to how insane what he’s saying sounds like. Upon enquiring as to what actions Agnes has taken since the assault, he admonishes her and states that “for future reference” the “correct” process would have been to etc etc.

What else can you say when confronted by an automaton spouting rote lines other than “thank you I’ll keep that in mind for the next time I’m sexually assaulted”?

And when Agnes is talking to the uni’s HR / Admin people, and they explain that due to a loophole, there’s nothing that they can do about the professor who attacked, but that they totally understand what she went through, “Because We’re Women.” “We’re women” they repeat in unison like drones, but what do they actually mean? Do they mean they understand how she feels because women are predominately attacked when it comes to sexual assault, and they are women? That they have experienced sexual assault (where nothing was done by the people who were supposed to do something to address it) as well? Or that that’s their way of saying “we know what you’ve gone through because of the Patriarchy, but we assure you that we’re not at fault even though we’re not going to help you in any way, because we’re women?”

That it comes off as absurdly hilarious is… a bracing testament to how delicately they've made this whole production. It’s a fine tightrope they navigate (as director and as the central character) that doesn’t downplay what they went through, but it’s trying to get us to understand an array of issues and feelings that go well beyond just the incident itself. She wishes for a lot of things that she can’t, this world can’t, provide, but primarily she wishes that she had been seen as a person, an entire human being, who that wretched professor couldn’t just bring himself to abuse for his own pleasure, because Agnes feels he couldn’t have done what he did otherwise.

Agnes may wish for justice, but she doesn’t want the awful jerk jailed, because he has a small child. I would have thought it would be better for this piece of shit to be away from his kid, because it’s not as if he models healthy attitudes towards women or bodily autonomy, but it’s not my story, it’s Agnes’. Her pain, as she perceives it, wouldn’t be alleviated by seeing him punished by the law (as if the courts would be likely to jail the fucker anyway.)

She wishes to not feel guilty for the times when she’s not thinking about The Bad Thing, but she also can’t stomach thinking about it constantly. Arrays of conflicting and contradictory emotions, to go along with all the other ones that we might assume a person feels having gone through this.

The film takes its time to tease out all these aspects, but it never feels like its wallowing in misery. For all that she has moments where she feels like destroying things, this isn’t a version of this sad tale where obliterating self-destruction or violent acting out (as opposed to revenge) as a form of self-harm comes in to play. Something can still be quiet, deeply felt and still agonising.

After a scene with a reoccurring character who just simply doesn’t like Agnes, being Natasha (Kelly McCormack), who blurts out her resentments about Agnes having scored the coveted job, she mentions casually that she has sex with the professor, hoping it would help her professionally, and that it wasn’t very good, but whatever.

For reasons, this sends Agnes into a tailspin. She drives off somewhere while having a panic attack, which leads to a scene with a random character played by the great John Carrol Lynch, who offers her some calming support despite never having met Agnes before. They share a sandwich, a very good one (this all happens in the Year with the Good Sandwich), but more importantly, since he’s a stranger, he offers her a comfort and a reassurance that she otherwise hasn’t been able to feel.

Like with grief, there is no timeline that someone can reasonably point to and say “of course you have to be over this by now. It takes this amount of time to “get” over sexual assault.” There is no actual statute of limitations, except as spouted by people who don’t actually care about you, otherwise why would they say such a thing? What they’re really saying is, “how you are feeling and expressing yourself makes me uncomfortable, and I would rather not have to deal with that”, and that can even come from people who like you or care about you. As Agnes states it, she grows weary of seeing fear in other people’s eyes when she expresses herself, especially if she’s just saying something as an outlet, rather than as something that needs to be addressed or reported to someone.

The film takes time to depict how these years have impacted on how Agnes thinks about herself and her relationship to sex, showing that over the passage of time, and of the stages she’s had to navigate in terms of how she feels about so many aspects in order to reach her “new” normal, whatever that is, which has its impact on how she sees herself in her relationships.

It means that by the film’s end, she is in a better state which means that she can be supportive of her friend Lydie, and her baby, which she couldn’t do before. It’s to the actual baby that she’s pre-emptively apologising, hence the title, because she’s making promises to this kid about how much she’ll try to give of herself, and how she’ll always listen to what the kid has to say no matter how scary (no judgement), and that she’s sorry that bad things will happen to her in the future, but she’ll do what she can to lessen the pain when she can.

I have no doubt that a lot of what I might have mentioned sounds quite contrived and artificial, like there are bizarre scenes wedged in just to relate another aspect of what the filmmaker wants to say. As odd as many moments of the film are, they’re odd in ways I find understandable and endearing, and whether they’re contrived or not they’re done in such a way, delivered in such a serious but light way, that they add more layers, more understanding, at no-ones expense, and certainly not the flick’s expense. I’m primarily thinking of the sandwich scene, but also the jury duty scene (perfectly handled by Hettienne Park) where a prosecutor asks questions, as sensitively as she can, to a potential juror who expresses herself in complex and unpredictable ways, which seem beyond the pale in a courtroom setting, and yet still strike us as honest, as true to the character within the context of the film.

Look I loved the flick, and I have done it a disservice if I’ve made it sound like a slog or like a serious intellectual exercise in wry academic pretentiousness. It’s deftly made, and ably performed by all concerned, and yes it’s about terrible things, but it’s delivered to us in an artful and intellectually engaging way which doesn’t detract at all from the emotional truths these characters are aching for.

9 times I wish we lived in a less selfish world out of 10

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“I'm sorry that bad things are going to happen to you. I hope they don't. If I can ever stop something from being bad, let me know. But, sometimes, bad stuff just happens. That's why I feel bad for you in a way. That you're alive, and you don't know that yet. But I can still listen, and not be scared. So that's good, or that's something, at least.” - Sorry, Baby

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi245614617/