"Sorry, Baby" is a Masterful Look at the Emotions of Life

There was a time in my life when I didn’t think it was ever going to get better, not because I was the happiest I’d ever been, but because I was the saddest. When that happened, it was hard to watch my friends succeeding and finding joy, despite how genuinely happy I was for them. Those conflicting emotions are portrayed beautifully in Eva Victor’s new film.

Content Note: Both the film and this review discuss sexual assault

Sorry, Baby is a masterpiece on all fronts. Victor’s performance as Agnes is captivating. From the start the audience is sucked into their world, feeling their feelings and hanging on to every microscopic change in expression. Naomi Ackie is the perfect foil; her character Lydie is intensely happy and yet meets Agnes in her sadness all while Agnes is trying to do the opposite. Agnes and Lydie are funny, and their chemistry brings moments of levity to a movie that handles dark topics incredibly well. 

The central conceit of the film is that Agnes and Lydie are graduate students at a university. They have the same advisor, but when he sexually assaults Agnes, it sets the two on very different paths. In the present day, four years after graduation, Agnes is a professor at the same school and Lydie has moved to New York City, fallen in love, and gotten pregnant. The house they once shared is now just Agnes’s, but the town is still filled with the memories.

The subject of sexual assault, particularly campus sexual assault, is a fraught one that movies do not typically handle well. Too often, male directors use rape as a plot device or a weapon against their female protagonists. In Sorry, Baby, Agnes’s story is treated with care. Victor, who is nonbinary, understands what Agnes is going through. The use of long, quiet scenes that allow the audience to sit in the discomfort of what is happening was so much more powerful than any amount of graphic content could have been. Seeing what happened to Agnes is not just potentially triggering to some viewers, but it couldn’t have served the story as well as what we did see. 

Allowing queer people to tell their own stories came through in Lydie’s character arc as well. Lydie realized that she was a lesbian sometime either late in graduate school or afterwards, and there are adorable scenes between the friends as Lydie slowly comes to terms with herself. There is no big coming out moment or panicked realization, just comments made between people who trust each other that eventually builds to the full truth. It was a beautiful representation of friendship between two queer people and I was grateful to see it on screen.

I truly cannot emphasize enough how wonderful this movie is. I didn’t expect it to be half as powerful as it was. From the cinematography to the script to the acting, Sorry, Baby is undoubtedly one of the best films of the year.