Some of the best movie-watching experiences I’ve ever had were when I went in blind. I decided to watch Sorry, Baby because the poster, which was shared on several cinema-loving corners of the Internet, had a woman holding a cat. It did not prepare me for the heaviness of the movie’s overall idea and plot.
Written and directed by Eva Victor, who also plays Agnes, the main character, Sorry, Baby is slow and artsy, but extremely effective. It shows how the trauma developed after a sexual assault has a ripple effect and loudly echoes in the victim and her life for years after.
The movie is split into 5 non-linear chapters, each representing a year of Agnes’ life, and it starts with the second chapter of her story, called “The Year with the Baby.” Her best friend, Lydie, comes to visit Agnes in her small, secluded house to tell her about her pregnancy and to share a friendly dinner with the English Literature group they were part of as grads in college. Lydie’s reaction is the only clue that something is not quite right with Agnes when someone mentions a former professor whom they all admired.
The second part of the movie, “The Year with the Bad Thing,” is the one that shows the pivotal moment that changed Agnes’ life forever. It takes us through the final year of Agnes, Lydie, and their friends as grad students, and shows their relationship with their advisor, the English Literature professor Preston Decker.
He is presented as a professor who connects with his students, and he seems to have a deep and sincere appreciation for Agnes, praising her insightful paper more than the others. When he invited her over to his house to talk about it, I thought nothing of it. The way Victor chose to show, or to be more precise, not to show what happens between Agnes and the professor by only filming his house from the outside as the hours pass and the day turns into night, was an excellent cinematic choice. How Agnes leaves his house, goes to her car, and drives home, and how she talks to Lydie about what he did to her, and to the doctor the morning after, shows a lack of comprehension, but also a deep understanding of what happened to her. When she goes to the school to report him, the higher-ups, who were also women, tell her that they can’t do anything as he has moved away overnight, and repeatedly say, “We’re women, we know.” That scene and that line highlight the whole idea of the movie. What they’re actually saying is, “We’ve all gone through this. It should be common knowledge that an inherent part of being a woman is to suffer through abuse and live through trauma. It’s a fact of life.”
The rest of the chapters show how the trauma of her sexual abuse quietly follows Agnes everywhere and how it will never stop. Even when she gets his position and his office at the college, which I think could be interpreted as a form of retribution, she can’t take delight in it. What happened, happened, and nothing in the world can erase that.
The aftermath of rape and sexual abuse has been discussed before in movies like The Tale and Precious, and in miniseries like Unbelievable, but the topic has never felt so poignant as in Sorry, Baby. And even though the movie is a study of one single character working in academia, I think it speaks to all of us members of the female gender from all walks of life. It is a devastating commentary on how common abuse is for women, and how society expects us to accept it as a fact of life.
