In this life, bad things will happen to all of us. But much like that adage about happy families all being alike in the same way while the unhappy ones offer up interesting contours of damage for us to consider, so do the kinks and swerves of our particular damage shape our psyche and influence how we move through the world after the harm’s been done.
In the specific case of Agnes Ward (Eva Victor, who also writes and directs), English Literature Phd student and aspirant full-time faculty member at their alma mater, the damage comes in the shape of being sexually assaulted by their professor Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi), only for him to pre-emptively tender his resignation and take flight before suffering any professional fallout for violating his favourite student during a supposed thesis consultation at his home.
While Agnes finds support in friend and fellow doctorate student Lydie (Naomie Ackie), the same can’t be said for neither faculty administration nor the medical establishment. And as life rolls on for everyone else, even through big career wins – which ironically spur the jealous ire of another of Agnes’ peers, Natasha (Kelly McCormack) – Agnes is left to nurture their pain like a brooding egg, its occupant regaling them with a keen kick every now and then.
Coldly reproduced on paper, the core of Victor’s story – the non-binary multi-hyphenate’s debut feature – will come across as unforgivably bleak. But what we get instead is an achingly human black comedy that resists both melodrama and easy answers. A doe-eyed, willowy presence ensconced in the rarefied world of literary studies – and isolated further in the perpetually muggy, folk-horror-adjacent New England milieu – Agnes is too wry a subject to embody an archetypal movie victim. Instead, her pain seeps through each frame, much as she struggles to keep it contained.
Against Hollywood convention but very much true to life, there is never a definite moment in which one ‘gets over’ the pain… there’s no rousing scene of clear catharsis. Look, much as I love watching abusers get their just desserts or characters ‘letting go’ by screaming into a gorge or something (I’m looking at you, Garden State and Little Miss Sunshine), we have to accept these for what they are: either wishful thinking or short-hand visualisations of complex psychological states that can fit snugly within conventional screenwriting structures. Victor clearly isn’t interested in any of that: Sorry, Baby operates in a more realist mode that tracks a journey of resignation, rather than some kind of transcendent rebirth which suggests that everything is going to be okay, actually.
Victor’s dramatic intent is also clearly mirrored in the film’s very shape. Eschewing a linear narrative in favour of a series of ‘chapters’ – captioned as such – which loop back and forth across time, the 93-minute film shows how Agnes both changes and stays the same in the wake of their assault. This is, again, a credit to the honesty of Victor’s vision: life is a mingled mess of the good as well as bad. A chance encounter with a gruff but kindly sandwich shop owner Pete (John Carroll Lynch) is one for the ages: a reminder of the lifeline offered by genuine human connection, especially when it pops up out of nowhere, like a small but precious beatific boon. And then, of course, there is Olga the cat, whom we also track in age from adorable foundling kitten to full-blown domesticated killer. The world takes away but it also gives, and Victor lingers on both the blows and the gifts.
Because for all its ostensible slice-of-life trappings, this is also a meticulously constructed feature, both in terms of its non-chronological narrative and thematic make-up, endowing it with a layered richness that would doubtlessly elicit an approving thumbs-up from literary modernists that Agnes pores over and, subsequently, teaches to her coterie of students.
A discussion of the uncomfortable clash between the beauty of Vladimir Nabokov’s prose in Lolita, and the novel’s inherently horrific subject matter could very well be a self-referential commentary on Victor’s own decision to treat the fallout of rape with a light touch. Then there’s references to mice as omens of both life and death – she refers to Lydie’s soon-to-pop child as one early on, while a later scene finds Agnes (‘the lamb of god’) having to take one out of its misery after Olga’s had her way with them, prompting her to exclaim “if you wanted to kill it, just kill it!”… an accusation that she may often have wished to level at Preston Decker in the years following his act of violation.
But life goes on for Agnes… for now, at least.
Sorry, Baby will be shown at Spazju Kreattiv, Valletta on August 29 and 30; September 4, 7, 13 and 17
