A critical success and award winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Sorry, Baby is the directorial debut of its writer and star, Eva Victor. The film follows Agnes (Victor), an English professor at a small American college, in the aftermath of a sexual assault by one of her teachers when she was a student there.
The story, based on Victor’s own experience of trauma, is structured in non-linear chapters that encompass the time after, before and during the assault. This makes for a raw and unflinching, yet nuanced, depiction of trauma’s aftermath, which presents Agnes as a fully rounded and complex character.
The film resists the idea that trauma must define a character’s identity, instead exploring how people live with, around and beyond painful experiences. Agnes is funny, awkward, self-aware, sometimes messy, wholly real and excellent at her job. She refers to the sexual assault euphemistically as “the thing” or “the bad thing”, which Victor has said is an attempt to protect vulnerable audience members.
