I’ve lived a long life and seen a lot of pain and suffering during that time. One of the things I haven’t been around is sexual abuse towards women. As a man who hasn’t been in a lot of relationships myself, I find these topics to be a little distant in my mind. Now physical abuse and such. I’ve been around quite a bit when I was a child. I can definitely speak on this. Sorry, Baby, the directorial debut of Eva Victor, is a film dealing with sexual abuse and dealing with how to cope with that trauma personally. There have been many films that have dealt with this kind of  situation, but the way they/she goes about it is what’s so very interesting about this story. A lot of women are going to relate with the way this traumatic situation unfolds.

Victor plays Agnes, a young professor at Fairfield College in a small town in Massachusetts. They live (Agnes, like Eva Victor, identifies as non-binary) alone with a stray cat they found in an old New England style home. Occasionally, Agnes has an old college friend and roommate Lydie (Naomie Acki) come by for vacations. There is also Agnes’ next-door neighbor, Gavin (Lucas Hedges), who comes over from time to time to keep them company. At the beginning of the film, Agnes is still recovering from a traumatic experience that happened four years prior and has been trying to move on with their life.

The way that Victor chose to tell this story was fascinating to me. It’s a dark story, but it has moments of comedy thrown in to lighten the mood from time to time. Victor plays her character quite straightforwardly, though. She lets everything happen around her and rarely reacts in any kind of way. This is how she is dealing with the very traumatic situation that happened to her.  She has a hard time processing it and chooses to be very reserved and quiet. The timing of the way she acts is a bit off-putting to me. I felt the character needed to have more emotion about what happened to her. This is Victor’s script and film, though, so she made these decisions for the sake of the film.

The story is told in a non-linear fashion with a framing sequence called The Year of the Baby. These mostly deal with her friendship with the Acki character and her impending pregnancy and subsequent child named Jane. The other section titles are called The Year of the Paper, The Year Of Questions, and The Year of the Sandwich. Each of the three sections besides the framing sequence gives the film perspective on the character played by Victor. She meets some people who have her get some perspective on the situation she’s been through. One of them is a prosecutor, played by Hettienne Park in  the local town court, and the other is a sandwich shop owner played by John Carroll Lynch. They give her advice on the traumatic scenario she was a part of some years before.

This was a difficult movie for me to watch, but I heard good things about it out of the Sundance Film Festival back in January. The fact that A24 was attached to it made me very interested in seeing it. Not having dealt with this type of thing myself in my life, I have a hard time feeling anything for the character. From the beginning of the film, I didn’t have a connection to her at all. The way she acted, not knowing what happened to her prior, she felt distant to me, and that didn’t give me anything regarding the character. Now, if this was a relative of mine like my mother or sister, obviously, I would feel differently.  I’m only human, so when I found out what happened to her, I was sad for a little while, but I got over that fast. I may take some heat for this, but I didn’t relate to her one bit. That’s why I wasn’t as affected by what she had gone through as maybe others might. I can only say it like it is  for me.

The supporting cast in this film was fantastic. From Acki as the best friend talking about having sex all the time and cursing to Hedges being the awkward neighbor who just wants to be with the lead character and all the others. This movie had an amazing supporting cast that didn’t have to be big or over the top.They just needed to be there for the lead character. Two supporting characters I thought were necessary but awkward were two college administrators who had to talk with the Victor character about the abuser and what he has done since the incident happened. These ladies were very cringe but in a way that made sense regarding the situation that happened.  Other than them, though, I loved this supporting cast quite a bit.

Sorry, Baby is a solid first outing for writer/director and star Eva Victor. It deals with very difficult subject matter. The film has a mixture of drama with some humor sprinkled in for good measure.The supporting cast was fantastic, with Acki being the standout. Which is different from the other roles she’s played in her career thus far. I was glad to see Hedges again after so many years off screen. Victor, as an actress, was too wooden for me. Maybe that’s the point of the character, but I didn’t care much for how she portrayed this character. As a writer/director, she has a lot of promise. I’d definitely be interested in seeing what she does next. This film wasn’t exactly geared for me, and that’s fine. I don’t mind watching  movies with difficult subject matter in them. I’m just making them more relatable and engaging for me or others like me. This was a good film, but not great, like I was hoping it would be, 

3 stars

Dan Skip Allen