Plot Summary: Agnes, a professor in an idyllic college town, copes with an earth-shattering event that happened to her several years ago. Her recovery is not linear, even as her career succeeds without a hitch. Agnes encounters both old and new friends who carry and comfort her through the experience and bring her to the other side of the worst of her pain and grief. 

Runtime: 104 minutes

Director: Eva Victor 

Writer: Eva Victor 

Main Cast: 

• Eva Victor as Agnes
• Naomi Ackie as Lydie
• Lucas Hedges as Gavin
• John Carroll Lynch as Pete
• Louis Cancelmi as Decker

Review by: Lauren C.

I enjoyed the unconventional way of organizing the film’s acts and movement through time, described by important, but secondary occurrences, like babies and really good sandwiches. We meet Agnes several years after her assault, still struggling with the fact of what happened to her and how. We then move back in time to her time in grad school leading up to the assault, the assault itself, and the immediate aftermath. For the final section, we head to the present where Agnes begins to find a degree of peace and healing through her relationships with others. 

Victor creates a sense of dread that lingers over the first and second sections of the film, without a single character even uttering the word “rape,” until the film moves back to show the time directly after the assault. The climax of Sorry, Baby had my theatre audience in rapt silence. The wordless sequence speaks volumes through what Victor chooses to show and what they choose to obscure. 

Again, the script is a meditation on crisis and trauma. It reads as universal, but with a distinctly millennial way of moving through the world in such a situation. Characters in their late twenties and thirties, using wit and charm with a touch of awkwardness to get through the sorrow.

A spare piano score by Lia Ouyang Rusli adds to the intimacy and quietness of the film and echoes the silences and taboos around the reality of what healing and justice look like for sexual assault victims, particularly in academia.