FILM OF THE WEEK: Sorry, Baby - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby is a film that doesn’t announce itself with bombast or melodrama. It unfolds gently, in fragments, moving through time with deliberate softness.

Told out of chronological order, the film traces the evolution of Agnes, a literature professor who carries the weight of a private trauma while continuing to make jokes, form connections, argue about Nabokov with her students, and lie awake at night listening to her old house creak under the wind.

There’s something deceptively simple in the story's structure. She chooses to begin not with the worst moment of Agnes’ life, but with an ordinary reunion between two old friends, Agnes and Lydie, who once lived together in this very house, and who reconnect with an intimate shorthand that only years of love and history can produce. They laugh, defend each other, celebrate each other’s wins and are constant presences through each other’s struggles.

The chapters that follow take us back in time, to the year of the Bad Thing, a phrase the film never treats lightly but also never fetishises. The Bad Thing refers to a sexual assault committed by Agnes’ thesis advisor, an incident that happens entirely offscreen. It reverberates throughout the rest of the film, not as a single seismic event but as a constant tremor that reshapes Agnes’ sense of safety, her relationships, her future, and her body. In keeping the camera outside the house where it happens, Victor makes a clear statement of intent. The story is not about the spectacle of violence, but about the long, nonlinear, unglamorous work of surviving it, sometimes with grace, often with gallows humour, and always with a stubborn refusal to be flattened into a symbol or a statistic.

What’s remarkable is the lightness of touch Victor brings to this heavy material, both as writer and performer. Her Agnes is funny, wry, brilliant, sometimes aloof and sometimes a little bit needy, moving through her life with humour and deep sense of love layered with sadness and pain.

The supporting cast feels fully inhabited, with Naomi Ackie as Lydie bringing not just charm, humour and emotional intelligence, but a real sense of lived-in history to Agnes and Lydie’s fiercely loyal friendship. Kelly McCormack plays Natasha, a hilariously self-centred academic frenemy who is both wildly inappropriate and unexpectedly vulnerable, and Lucas Hedges plays Agnes’ neighbour. Hedges gives a goofy and lovable performance and their brief, tender romantic connection is neither redemptive nor tragic but instead strangely warm and awkward, like real life often is. John Carroll Lynch is wonderful as ever as an unexpected confidante and Louis Cancelmi plays the predator Decker, whose presence lingers even when he’s gone, not because the film wants to dwell on him, but because Agnes - like so many survivors - has to.

What’s most striking is the balance between humour and heartache. An appointment with a doctor after the assault is, on paper, not at all humorous. But Lydie and Agnes eviscerate his invasive and crude questions in a wonderful display of solidarity, wryness and cutting comments, not even attempting to conceal their exasperation with his ignorance. Victor allows us to laugh with Agnes at the absurdity of the situation instead of pity her. She’s strong enough not to internalise this as her fault, and she has Lydie to protect her, so we don’t have to; we can simply witness. The pseudo-feminism in college’s toothless administration is also skewered brilliantly, but it’s a conversation with a lawyer when Agnes is called or jury duty that unexpectedly lets Agnes grapple with what justice would mean to her - and like many survivors, it’s not based on blind faith in the legal system, but rather a hope for a better world.

The film is mostly comprised of small moments - a late-night walk, a job offer, an interesting class, a bathtime conversation, an uncomfortable revelation, an unexpected connection. These accumulate to form a portrait of a woman who's not only healing, but refusing to be defined entirely by her wounds.

Cinematographer Mia Cioffi Henry captures the muted beauty of New England with a gentle eye, making Agnes’ creaky old house feel like a character in its own right - full of corners where conversations used to happen, of shadows that resemble memories, of doors that can lock but not necessarily protect. The costumes, courtesy of Emily Constantino, are endearing and realistic - Agnes in oversized tees, masculine cuts and large winter coats that suggest both comfort and armour, as well as giving some insight into the character’s subtly referenced gender identity. (In real life, Eva Victor uses she/they pronouns.) The film’s sound design uses silence with care, allowing the quiet moments to breathe, ache, and hold us in place.

What Victor achieves here is no small thing. It's a story about sexual assault that neither flinches nor flattens, about grief that still makes room for laughter, and survival that doesn’t require catharsis or resolution to feel complete. Instead we watch as Agnes teaches her class, pets her cat, makes tea, visits her friend’s baby, and quietly continues to exist, with the Bad Thing still part of her, but not the whole of her.

In the end, Sorry, Baby doesn’t promise healing in the way movies often do. It offers something subtler and perhaps more generous - the idea that even after everything, you can still love, still laugh, still rage against the absurdity of it all, and still, unbelievably, get up again the next day. It’s not a tragedy. It’s not a triumph. It’s just a life. And that, in this film, is more than enough.

One of the best films of the year.

Written and directed by Eva Victor. Cinematography by Mia Cioffi Henry.
Starring Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Louis Cancelmi, Kelly McCormack, Lucas Hedges, John Carroll Lynch. 102 mins
In cinemas now.