Written and Directed by Eva Victor | 103 min | ▲▲▲1/2
A potent, difficult drama about the ways sexual assault can ruin your life and linger for years. The writer/director, Eva Victor, is also the lead actor — where that kind of move could be dubbed a vanity flex, this film feels like anything but. It’s not a perfect movie, but it can’t help but impress with its ambition and achievement.
Agnes (Victor) is a college prof at a small school somewhere in, I’m guessing, the rural Northeastern United States — the wintry cinematography providing grey ol’ Nova Scotia vibes. Agnes’ good friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) is visiting, staying at her house for a couple of days. Lots of subjects are discussed, including the fact that Lydie’s pregnant. The friends refer obliquely to a trauma in Agnes’ past, but don’t dwell on it.
Then the film flashes back to “The Year of the Bad Thing.” Agnes and Lydie are grad students completing their theses, and their supervisor (Louis Cancelmi) seems especially impressed by Agnes. He invites her to his home to discuss her draft and the film cleverly, chillingly, locks down the camera outside the house, smash cut to twilight, and Agnes leaves in a rush, never bothering to tie her shoes.
The film does an amazing job with mundanities and micro-aggressions that a woman has to withstand in order to simply declare a sexual assault, from the unsympathetic (male) doctor who examines her to the administrative drones at the university, unable to act because the supervisor quits and takes a job elsewhere. That’s just the start of what Agnes has to navigate. She has a stain on her soul she can’t wash away.
The chapter titles continue, and we jump forward to other years, continuing to see the legacy of that assault. What surprises as we go along is a wry touch in the script — it allows space for reflections of Agnes’ depression and anxiety, but also humour, and lovely moments of kindness in scenes with Ackie, Lucas Hedges, and John Carroll Lynch. The balance of tone here in a first feature suggests a master storyteller getting a handle on her tools.
But I did say it’s not perfect, didn’t I? The opening chapter does a good job of establishing the deep, honest connection between Agnes and Lydie, but it also makes Agnes out to be weirdly inarticulate, a character detail carried through the rest of the film. Sorry, Baby makes no effort to plausibly suggest Agnes’ talent or academic bona fides, no conversations about what’s in her thesis, and no scenes of her actually teaching.
She’s warm and sympathetic, but I just never once bought her as someone with the kind of incisive intelligence and communication skills that she’s frequently credited with, which unfortunately undermines the foundation of her character. It’s a small, but key issue that keeps what’s otherwise one of the year’s most impressive debuts from soaring.
