‘Sorry, Baby’ Review: Eva Victor’s Feature Debut Is a Frank, Funny and Tender Spin on the Female ‘Traumedy’

If the name Eva Victor is unfamiliar to you, it may not be for long.

A winning, at times strikingly strong big-screen debut, Sorry, Baby positions the writer/director/star as a triple threat, with a specific, fully formed voice blending irony and earnestness to beguiling effect. Despite some familiar U.S. indie beats (Sundance is Sundance), the film is a disarmingly frank, intimate spin on the female “traumedy” — perceptive and funny and full of feeling.

Injecting a serious story of sexual assault with low-key laughs and considerable charm, Sorry, Baby sometimes leaves you wishing it went down a little less easy; you might find yourself missing rougher edges or regretting an overly cutesy choice here, an on-the-nose touch there. But whatever the movie lacks in surprise or sophistication, it makes up for in sly comic verve and a soulfulness that sticks with you.

Above all the film has, in Victor, a gift of a lead. As Agnes, a literature grad-student-turned-professor at a rural New England university, she exudes, by turns, an elegant reserve and the mischievousness of someone whose mind is alive with wry appraisals only selectively shared. Gravely beautiful from certain angles and Olive-Oyl-awkward from others, her deadpan disrupted by ripples of raw vulnerability, Victor is occasionally reminiscent of better-known performers — think Greta Gerwig crossed with Vicky Krieps, plus a dash of Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Yet she registers as a fresh, versatile presence, witty without being offputtingly caustic, and just as compelling in her aching emotion as in her quips and bon mots.

Sorry, Baby is a narrative of healing told neither as a linear journey nor in fussy, puzzle-like fashion, but in five not-quite-chronological chapters, each representing a year. In the first, Agnes’ best friend from grad school, Lydie (a wonderful Naomi Ackie), comes to spend a few days with her at the house they used to share near campus. Lydie now lives in New York with her partner, but the women have remained close, and scenes of them together are rich with teasing warmth and a sense of deep, sustaining connection. As two people who find both comfort and genuine pleasure in being around each other, Victor and Ackie have a giddy, ride-or-die chemistry that can’t be faked.

If Sorry, Baby starts off like a chatty, almost Rohmerian millennial comedy, darker undertones soon creep toward the surface. At a dinner hosted by a former classmate (Kelly McCormack, spectacularly sour), the mention of Agnes’ erstwhile thesis advisor, Professor Decker, makes her visibly uneasy. Lydie’s quick changing of the subject — followed by a shot of her hand squeezing Agnes’ leg reassuringly under the table — tells us much of what we need to know.

The subsequent chapters take us backward and then forward in time, covering the lead-up to our protagonist’s assault by Decker (a queasily excellent Louis Cancelmi) as well as its immediate and longer-term aftermath. The handful of scenes between Agnes and her handsome, young-ish mentor are all the more unsettling for how breezy they are, how ordinary in their polite scholarly banter and hints of mutual attraction. Agnes reveres Decker, but — as we learn when Lydie ribs her about having a crush — she’s also clear about her boundaries, mainly craving his validation of her intellect.

Victor doesn’t show us the rape. Rather, in a move that feels both apt and a tad over-calculated, she offers a few consecutive long shots of the house where the attack takes place, separated by cuts marking the progression of nightfall. Back home, from the safety of her bathtub, Agnes gives Lydie a moment-by-moment breakdown of what happened. It’s a shatteringly written and acted scene, with Victor, filmed in close-up, delivering hushed arpeggios of shock, disappointment and confusion.

Sorry, Baby portrays Agnes’ recovery not as any sort of concentrated or cathartic “process,” but as something that happens in fits, starts and stumbles amid the regular — and, in this case, frequently triggering — occurrences of everyday life: a job promotion, a jury duty summons, a confrontation with an old rival, so-so sex with a new suitor.

Victor also skewers the institutions and people that routinely fail rape victims, from tone-deaf male doctors to female school administrators who pantomime solidarity while denying any legal responsibility. Even when this material veers toward the obvious, or plays too much like a bit, Victor’s skilled timing as a performer gives it some snap.

Like other contemporary comediennes of chaos and discomfort (Gerwig, Lena Dunham, Ilana Glazer, Jenny Slate), Victor shows us a woman who uses humor to dodge and deflect — to avoid tangling with life’s trickier moments and tougher realities. Agnes shares with characters played by those actresses a certain shamelessness; her attempt to conceal a cat in her jacket under the unimpressed gaze of a grocery cashier is facepalm-y perfection. But Victor leans less into clownish mortification than her predecessors, making room instead for a delicate quietude and sincerity.

It’s an approach that helps transform her scenes with Lucas Hedges, as Agnes’ smitten neighbor Gavin, from rom-com shtick into something truer and more distinctive. Their nervous courtship culminates in one of the film’s high points, a bathroom-set conversation of amusingly squirmy candor and halting tenderness.

There are rookie missteps. I could have skipped John Carroll Lynch as a gruff-but-kind sandwich shop owner with a Mass-accent you could fry clams in; ditto an unfortunate — and dubiously symbolic — episode involving a battered mouse. And Victor errs on the side of caution visually, the dialogue-heavy proceedings often captured in schematic shot, reverse shot, two-shot chunks. Still, she and DP Mia Cioffi Henry conjure a vivid vibe of wintry, picturesque campus inertia, and frame the actors with sensitivity and care.

Ackie, as nuanced as she is vibrant, proves the primary beneficiary of Victor’s generous way with her cast, delivering her best performance since her stunning turn on season 3 of Aziz Ansari’s Master of None. One of the more interesting things about Sorry, Baby is indeed how it uses the friendship between Agnes and Lydie — their closeness a constant despite periods of physical distance — as a way into this material, a prism through which to view Agnes’ resilience.

Yet the movie never treats Lydie as a sidekick, or a vessel through which Agnes works through her trauma; Victor is interested in Lydie as her own person with her own needs, desires and life projects. There are, at times, flashes of exasperation in her responses to Agnes’ possessiveness or flippancy. Refreshingly, though, any tension between them remains the stuff of suggestion and subtext; the story here is the mutual concern and fierce solidarity binding the two women.

If Sorry, Baby is clear-eyed about the extent to which other people carry us through ordeals, it also acknowledges how much we grow — are forced to grow — in their absence. A coda in which Lydie visits Agnes again — this time with her partner (E.R. Fightmaster) and their infant — finds Agnes reciprocating Lydie’s dependability, helping her in a small but meaningful way. In a final monologue I found a bit forced upon first viewing, then increasingly moving in retrospect, we sense that Agnes hasn’t just gotten back on her feet; she’s confident, now, in her power to lift others up along with her.