Sorry, Baby Review: A New and Improved Sundance Darling

We’re to understand that while some of this maladjustment is native to Agnes, more is attributed to the aftershock of a Terrible Event. And while Sorry, Baby doesn’t explicate what that event is until its second act, it makes little attempt at misdirection: Agnes was sexually assaulted by her grad school advisor, a seemingly sweet, nervous author named Decker (the improbably named Louis Cancelmi). It’s ordinary, it’s brutal; there is an essay to be written about the proliferation of films and books about sexual abuse in these institutions as a metacommunication about the dimensions and texture of the problem.

Sorry, Baby moves deftly between tones, not only from scene to scene, but within discrete conversations. (One exchange Agnes has with her neighbor-slash-occasional lover, Gavin—a winning, overqualified Lucas Hedges—conveys the implication of violence and high-rom-com chemistry without stopping to belabor either.) Its greatest sleight of hand is in its depiction of the assault and its aftermath. After a logistical snafu ends their initial meeting about Agnes’ thesis, Decker makes the casual suggestion that the makeup session be at his house near campus. Agnes can’t balk at this without seeming (to use the appropriately gendered word) hysterical; Decker has also been nothing but earnest and warm to her thus far, to the point where Lydie has joked about their relationship. And so she walks up the stairs to his porch. We see her take off her boots, we see her enter.

And that’s it. What follows is a static shot of Decker’s house where, as afternoon turns to evening, we presume Agnes is the victim of some sort of sexual violence. When she finally leaves, she doesn’t exactly flee: She puts on her boots hastily, leaving them untied, but does not run. Decker watches from the doorway, his hands on his hips, stiff, still. Now, at once, the camera follows as Agnes hurries across town in a daze.

That indirect depiction is followed immediately, however, by a scene at the house Agnes still shares with Lydie. She sits in the bathtub, evidently numb, recounting what just happened. The story is halting, its end inevitable; it’s also couched in self-doubt, second-guessing, disbelief. While the scene is rendered in a mostly unbroken shot, it’s a showcase for Victor the actor rather than Victor the director. Aside from accommodating Ackie’s remarkably layered performance, the reverse shots keep the viewer’s mind from wandering toward the filmmaking technique, and allow it to be fully immersed in what’s happening on screen. Which is to say: horror.

Victor wrote Sorry, Baby after nearly a decade of open discussion about not only the prevalence of sexual abuse but the insufficiency of our responses to it, including from those who are supposed to be helpful and sympathetic. Just as the conversation outside of Gavin’s house contains an impressive knot of tones, Victor shows, in the wake of Agnes’ assault, the apparent confidence of a writer who trusts her audience. The women from the university who tell her there’s nothing to be done are not necessarily meant to stand in for All Women, and the judge who excuses her from the jury pool in an unrelated case is less a stand-in for Justice than a colorful side character. Over and over, Victor argues for the emotional experience of suffering, that recovering from terrible trauma is genuinely complicated. There are no pairs of tidily poetic contradictions, but a morass of inner conflict, uncertainty, pain, and relief.

A cat appears as a symbol of displaced emotional energy, then simple love, then a more complicated sort of companionship; John Carroll Lynch pops up as a sandwich shop owner who’s a bit of a sage. By the time we arrive at Sorry, Baby’s coda—in which Agnes is made to confront the literal baby Lydie’s has with a partner who’s clearly leery of Agnes—the optimism Agnes projects onto the child, and the pledges she makes to it, feel not like platitudes, but rather like talismans handed down from someone who has seen what is unspeakably ugly—and lived, because there’s nothing else to do.