Sorry, Baby – first-look review

Some­thing very bad hap­pened to Agnes. It’s hint­ed at in the first seg­ment of Sor­ry, Baby, when her best friend Lydie (Nao­mi Ack­ie) arrives for a vis­it, and asks Agnes (Eva Vic­tor) if she feels com­fort­able hav­ing the office of their old Eng­lish pro­fes­sor Pre­ston Deck­er (Louis Can­cel­mi). It’s fair­ly easy to infer what Lydie means by this, par­tic­u­lar­ly once they go for din­ner at the home of their for­mer class­mate Natasha (Kel­ly McCor­ma­ck) and she snark­i­ly remarks that Agnes was always ​“Decker’s favourite”. Lydie polite­ly changes the sub­ject and gives Agnes’s leg a reas­sur­ing squeeze.

There has been a del­uge of films about sex­u­al assault in the wake of MeToo, but for all the artis­tic cap­i­tal (right­ful­ly) afford­ed to sur­vivors, pre­cious lit­tle has mate­ri­al­ly changed with­in cul­ture. Some­times it feels as if there’s more resent­ment than ever towards vic­tims for dar­ing speak­ing up – it’s this real­i­ty that Eva Victor’s direc­to­r­i­al debut (which she wrote and stars in) cap­tures so well, in which a woman is sex­u­al­ly assault­ed by a man in a posi­tion of trust, and the accord­ing fall-out is the lack of fall-out. Noth­ing in the world at large changes; every­thing does in hers, revealed in non-chrono­log­i­cal order, with a chap­ter for each year fol­low­ing the assault. When she goes to see a (male) doc­tor fol­low­ing her assault, he chas­tis­es her for not going to the ER imme­di­ate­ly after­wards. He seems com­plete­ly indif­fer­ent to the trau­mat­ic inci­dent Agnes has expe­ri­enced; all Agnes and Lydie can do in response is laugh.

What else can Agnes do? The per­pe­tra­tor has already hand­ed in his notice at col­lege, and the school claim they’re unable to open a case against him as a result. Agnes doesn’t want to press charges against him because he has a child – and if she’s treat­ed like an incon­ve­nience by med­ical staff and her school, who’s to say the police would be any dif­fer­ent? So Agnes inter­nalis­es her pain. Over the course of the next four years, she lives her life in the same apart­ment she shared with Lydie dur­ing grad school, and teach­es at the same col­lege she used to attend. There’s an unspo­ken sense that Agnes can’t quite move on from the place; she sleep­i­ly haunts it, unable to find clo­sure because no one – except Lydie – under­stands or acknowl­edges what hap­pened to her.

It’s the banal­i­ty of endur­ing a sex­u­al assault that Vic­tor cap­tures so well in her film; how the trau­ma lingers long in the body, even when you keep insist­ing to every­one (includ­ing your­self) that you’re fine. When Agnes begins a ten­ta­tive romance with her sweet neigh­bour Gavin (Lucas Hedges) she doesn’t quite know how to respond to his affec­tion; when she has a pan­ic attack in her car, a gruff sand­wich shop own­er (John Car­roll Lynch) coach­es her through it and then makes her some food. These small moments of kind­ness – as well as the beau­ti­ful friend­ship between Agnes and Lydie – glim­mer like flecks of gold on the bot­tom of a murky riverbed, demon­strat­ing there is still some good in the world despite what hap­pened to her. Good that also exists in Agnes’ cat Olga, who she finds on the street as a kit­ten days after her assault, even if she even­tu­al­ly has to euthanise a mouse left in her bed.

This sur­pris­ing­ly vio­lent mer­cy killing feels like an odd­ly cathar­tic moment for Agnes, who is sym­bol­ic of thou­sands of peo­ple who nev­er receive jus­tice after being assault­ed, and reflects the strange rhythms of Sor­ry, Baby – a film which doesn’t pre­tend to have all the answers, but cer­tain­ly under­stands the bur­den of shame placed on sex­u­al assault sur­vivors, and how nav­i­gat­ing the world in the after­math of assault feels like walk­ing through dense fog, blind­ing reach­ing for a hand to guide you to the oth­er side.