Sorry, Baby Review
In Sorry, Baby, protagonist Agnes often ponders her future and, specifically, the absence of certain things in it. “I don’t see myself…” she begins in one scene, before trailing off. Here, she answers the question of her lover, who wonders if she’ll ever settle down and have children. “You’d be a great mom,” he reassures her, to little effect. The look on her face, though he’s not entirely privy to it, suggests more than hesitation. She struggles to see much beyond this version of her life that is scarred by the “Bad Thing” that happened to her.
Eva Victor’s directorial debut, Sorry, Baby, isn’t a light comedy, nor is it a grim drama. Its slice-of-life format is rather simple: broken into three non-linear chapters, we follow Agnes (Victor), a freshly tenured English professor in a small New England town that all of her friends have moved away from. While they’re buying houses and getting married, Agnes’ life is at a standstill. She lives alone in the same house she and her best-friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) shared as students, works at her old-grad school, and over the next several chapters of the story, tries to navigate life after “The Year with the Bad Thing” – a sexual assault at the hands of her professor Decker (Louis Cancelmi).
In our post MeToo movement world, this is a premise that could easily drift into trauma-porn filled melodrama. But in the hands of Victor and their sharp, witty yet unabashedly sincere script, it is triumphant. We don’t need to see the assault to understand the weight that it bears. Instead, we enter Agnes’ world and learn alongside her, meeting stand-out characters like Ackie’s Lydie, who not only sticks by Agnes’ side but vows to valiantly fight her corner no matter the cost.
There’s humourous reprieve from the painful moments, and while these pockets of laughter might feel absurd given the context, Victor ensures they never feel cheap or like they’re robbing you of any poignancy. Emphasis is placed on the healing power of the mundane, too, as one of Sorry, Baby’s most affecting scenes is delivered over a shared sandwich on the side of the road. There’s even a cute cat.
Altogether, Victor constructs a film that deftly balances light and dark, with every second feeling lived in and wholly grounded in the reality of life after trauma. It’s a reminder of the contradictions of healing. It’s not all tears and rage and wanting to set things alight all the time, but sometimes it is. Sorry, Baby doesn’t shy away from the fact that yes, horrible things happen. But it’s also not a film about that horrible thing. Instead, it’s a moving, funny and comforting reminder that takes things for what they are, sits beside you and says, “Yeah. I know.”
★★★★
In UK cinemas now / Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, Kelly McCormack, Lucas Cancelmi / Dir: Eva Victor / Picturehouse Entertainment / 15
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