In its intimacy and naked truth-telling, “Sorry, Baby” is the kind of independent movie that can seem like a gift. It’s an outwardly unassuming story of a woman, Agnes, grappling with the aftermath of an assault that has rearranged both her head and her world without destroying either. The movie has moments that can make you wince, but it’s often wryly and tartly funny because life is absurd and complicated, and people are, too. Something horrible happened to Agnes, and that horrible thing remains in her, body and soul. It changed how she lives, has sex and sleeps. Yet every morning it’s still Agnes who gets up; she’s still here.
“Sorry, Baby” is the striking feature directorial debut of Eva Victor, who also wrote and stars as Agnes. Quick-witted and sharp-tongued, Agnes is a tenured English lit professor when the movie opens, teaching in a university in a New England town. She seems relatively happy or at least settled, though also unsettled. With her cat, she lives in a pleasantly ordinary, two-story house with white clapboards that could use a paint job. It’s cozy inside, with comfortable chairs and stacks of books. Sometimes, when the wind blows, the house’s bones creak, prompting Agnes to see what’s outside. And then she locks the door.
Arranged nonchronologically in titled sections, “Sorry, Baby” opens in the present with Agnes eagerly expecting a visit from her close friend Lydie (an excellent Naomi Ackie). The two used to live together in the house when they were grad students at the same school where Agnes now teaches. Nothing particularly eventful occurs during Lydie’s visit, although everything that these two women say and do — their unforced ease, how they readily laugh together and exchange loving, knowing looks — adds detail and texture to the emerging story, as does the unexplained sight of them both tucked into Agnes’s bed when they’re sleeping.
It’s easy to like Agnes and Lydie, and want to fall into their little circle and, by extension, the movie. The performances are natural and nuanced; the characters attractive, with bright smiles, sharp minds and a tender, easy way of sharing space and quiet, a feeling of comfort that comes from a deep, shared history. Victor slips exposition into the realistic dialogue, but for the most part she doesn’t overexplain. Instead, she uses everyday chatter, glances, pauses and intonations to flesh out the characters and their relationships. When at one point Lydie asks — her face now still and serious, her voice briefly coloring with discreet emotion — if Agnes ever leaves the house, this seemingly simple question takes on great weight.
The heaviness of Lydie’s question, what’s behind it and why she’s posed it, emerges gradually. Not long after Lydie returns home — don’t leave, Agnes says, jokingly but not — the movie shifts back several years to when they were both in grad school. Rearranging time, deploying flashbacks and flash-fowards, can be a lazy filmmaking tic, but it’s integral here. The assault separated Agnes’s life into distinct periods: a before and an after. Real life may not be a series of tidy chapters that’s framed by a once upon a time and a happily every after, but shaping time into stories that we share, revisit, revise and keep reworking is how we make sense of life. And, as Victor gently insists throughout, this is a story about a life, not its trauma.
American independent film is rife with tragedies and characters suffering nobly or messily, with cascades of tears and snot and sometimes splashes of blood. Such stories can be obviously moving and at times a relief, especially when compared with mainstream cinema’s stubborn, Hollywood-style insistence on happy, heroic and triumphant endings. Shoulders will invariably be squared, eyes thoroughly dried. Characters will move on so that the audience can make it to the exit in one reassuring piece (and come back for more entertainment). Our movies are filled with extraordinary violence that grievously victimizes characters. Yet nobody, filmmakers very much included, likes a victim. It carries a taint, like loser.
In “Sorry, Baby,” Victor takes on what it means to suffer and survive without being defined — by yourself, by others — as a victim or a survivor. Victor’s arrangement of the narrative in chapters (“The Year With the Baby,” “The Year With the Bad Thing”) makes sense for a character who teaches literature. But Agnes doesn’t fit into chapters. There’s more to her, most notably her tricky feelings toward her assaulter; it’s not for nothing that she’s teaching Nabokov’s “Lolita.” When a student calls the novel disgusting, Agnes dryly says, well, “There’s a world in which that’s a relief to hear” (as I said, it’s funny). “How did you find the writing itself?” she then asks, a moment that speaks to Agnes’s story and to Victor’s telling.
In a blistering 2021 essay in The New Yorker about the ubiquity of “the trauma plot,” the critic Parul Sehgal rightly observed how it “flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom” while also insisting upon “its moral authority.” In “Sorry, Baby,” Victor makes the case that there’s another way to tell stories about bad things, partly by shrugging off moral authority (and sermons) while telling stories about other things: the different years and sometimes the nights with the guy next door (a delightful Lucas Hedges) and the sweet baby who appears like a ray of light. With sincerity and thoughtfulness, Victor invites you into a rounded world of vibrant, real faces and places that seem like they were there before the movie opens; it’s a modest miracle that when it ends, you don’t want to say goodbye — it sticks, beautifully.
Sorry, Baby
Rated R for an offscreen sexual assault and language. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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