About 25 minutes into Sorry, Baby, writer-director Eva Victor’s debut feature out this summer, a bad thing happens to Agnes, Victor’s twentysomething academic in a small New England town. The film is forthright and economical with the details; Agnes, an English PhD student, goes to meet her thesis adviser (Louis Cancelmi), with whom she shares a light flirtation and a mutual passion for Virginia Woolf. He shifts the meeting to his house, citing logistics and lavishing praise. Agnes enters at dusk; we linger outside as the shot cuts to dark, signaling hours past. She emerges in silence and hustles to her car, expressionless as she drives away for what feels like an eternity.
Back at home, Agnes sits in the bath and tells her best friend Lydie (an excellent Naomi Ackie) what happened in clipped, detached details. He was insistent. She tried to wriggle free and diffuse tension, he kept pushing. Eventually she froze – “my spine got cold,” she recalls – and she can’t remember the rest. Neither say the word sexual assault or rape, though it’s not for lack of vocabulary or understanding. “Yeah, that’s the thing,” Lydie eventually acknowledges. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
