‘Sorry, Baby’: This Is the Sundance Discovery You Should Look Out For

The Sundance Film Festival is a venue for discovering and spotlighting talented unknown voices, and it finds a unique one with Sorry, Baby, an amusing and sneakily affecting dramedy from comedian Eva Victor.

For her directorial debut, Victor stars as a young woman grappling with trauma, loss, and uncertainty, and while it wades through uncomfortably tumultuous waters, it manages to wring both humor and hope from its quiet and assured tale. Precisely the sort of indie that Robert Redford sought to champion when he began his Park City, Utah, showcase four-plus decades ago, it’s a breakout (produced by Barry Jenkins) that heralds Victor as an idiosyncratic and exciting new American artist.

Life is a struggle for Agnes (Victor), although Sorry, Baby introduces her happily welcoming her best friend Lydie (Don’t Blink’s Naomi Ackie) to her home. Agnes and Lydie attended English graduate school together, after which Lydie departed for New York and Agnes remained behind to continue working at the university. That decision has paid off, insofar as she’s been made a full-time professor.

At a dinner party hosted by their school chums, Natasha (Kelly McCormack) isn’t overtly jealous that Agnes got the gig instead of her. Agnes and Lydie agree that Natasha is incredibly rude. However, she’s an addendum to their time together, which they mostly spend joking around about men’s thrusting maneuvers during sex and Lydie’s pregnancy and impending parenthood with wife Fran (Er Fightmaster). Even so, Agnes is depressed and admits that it’s difficult to still be in this place (but, then, “it’s a lot to be wherever”), and Lydie is concerned enough about her that before she leaves, she commands her, “Don’t die.”

“Time really does fly,” says someone at the dinner party, yet that’s not quite the case for Agnes, who’ll later agree with sandwich shop owner Pete (John Carroll Lynch) that three years is a long stretch and, also, not really that long, especially when one is discussing awful incidents and their lingering impact.

For Agnes, that bad thing has to do with her university advisor Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi), who in a meeting goes out of his way to show interest in Agnes and to shrug off Nastasha. At an office sit-down, he continues praising her thesis before having to bolt early to tend to a childcare emergency, and Agnes lingers to sneak a peek at the in-progress novel he thinks is no good. An earlier conversation with Lydie indicates that they’re aware Decker has eyes for Agnes. Nonetheless, she remains noncommittal about him, fearing that his sexual interest is the reason he’s championing her writing.

Split into chapters that are arranged out of chronological order, Sorry, Baby posits Agnes as unsure of herself, her place in the world, and her future, and it doesn’t take long to rewind to the sexual assault that scarred the young woman.

Victor’s camera remains outside Decker’s house and lets day turn to night as this incident takes place, dramatizing only Agnes’ arrival and departure, and it’s one of numerous instances in which the director fixates on doors (often set deep within the frame) and people passing through them—a recurring motif that subtly speaks to the material’s underlying ideas about transition.

Similarly, Victor frequently views her protagonist in doorways and through windows, suggesting the character’s feelings of being trapped and suffocated, the latter of which is reinforced by a years-later panic attack while behind the wheel.

Victor’s Agnes has a funny streak but her eyes reveal interior wounds, not merely from her encounter with Decker—which she recounts to Lydie in harrowingly frank fashion—but from the aftermath, when she’s forced to contend with a callous male doctor and two equally faux-sympathetic female university staffers.

It’s a confidently modulated performance, with Agnes coming across as both tremulous and resilient, and her rapport with Ackie is charmingly intimate. That’s most evident when Agnes receives an impromptu visit from neighbor Gavin (Lucas Hedges), whose amiable sensitivity eventually proves to be a balm for Agnes’ anguished soul, and Lydie enthusiastically teases her BFF about the new hook-up.

Throughout, Agnes wrestles with her anger and sadness, albeit without great fanfare. At jury duty, a lawyer asks if anyone’s been the victim of a crime, and Agnes instinctively raises her hand and then hurriedly lowers it, thereby instigating a conversation that grows more awkward and unpleasant by the second.

She runs into a stray kitten on the street and, upon picking her up, admits, “Yup, I love you,” even if she finds her less endearing when she awakens to see that the cat has deposited a badly injured mouse in her bed, compelling her to kill it with a book. Sorry, Baby’s wittiness and sorrow are intertwined, and Victor’s script impressively shifts between the two as Agnes copes with her ordeal with realistic candor and tentativeness.

On a form, Agnes draws a circle between Male and Female and a two-way line between it and the latter choice—a gender-identity gesture that expresses the fundamentally in-between state in which the assault has left her.

Far from wholly despondent, however, Sorry, Baby laces its action with off-the-cuff jokiness, as when Pete first hears her name and impulsively responds, “Agnes? Whoa,” or when Agnes asks Gavin for lighter fluid and, rather than tell him that she needs it to torch Decker’s office, clumsily lies about wanting to make hot dogs. The film’s intimate moments are similarly silly and touching, none more so than Agnes asking to see Gavin’s limp member after he shyly tries to cover it up, and remarking that she prefers them in this non-erect state.

Sorry, Baby is a character study of an individual figuring out, in her own way, how to process pain and misery, as well as a world that invariably doles them out to every one of us. That’s made plain in a final, poignant scene opposite Lydie and Fran’s baby, during which Agnes confesses that bad stuff is unavoidable but that “If I can ever stop anything like that, let me know.” A tender saga about suffering and the continuous process of shouldering it—alone and together—Victor’s film recognizes the messy imperfectness of life, and the strength that comes from sharing one’s good, bad, and ugly feelings about it with others.