Something very bad happened to Agnes. It’s hinted at in the first segment of Sorry, Baby, when her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) arrives for a visit, and asks Agnes (Eva Victor) if she feels comfortable having the office of their old English professor Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi). It’s fairly easy to infer what Lydie means by this, particularly once they go for dinner at the home of their former classmate Natasha (Kelly McCormack) and she snarkily remarks that Agnes was always “Decker’s favourite”. Lydie politely changes the subject and gives Agnes’s leg a reassuring squeeze.
There has been a deluge of films about sexual assault in the wake of MeToo, but for all the artistic capital (rightfully) afforded to survivors, precious little has materially changed within culture. Sometimes it feels as if there’s more resentment than ever towards victims for daring speaking up – it’s this reality that Eva Victor’s directorial debut (which she wrote and stars in) captures so well, in which a woman is sexually assaulted by a man in a position of trust, and the according fall-out is the lack of fall-out. Nothing in the world at large changes; everything does in hers, revealed in non-chronological order, with a chapter for each year following the assault. When she goes to see a (male) doctor following her assault, he chastises her for not going to the ER immediately afterwards. He seems completely indifferent to the traumatic incident Agnes has experienced; all Agnes and Lydie can do in response is laugh.
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What else can Agnes do? The perpetrator has already handed in his notice at college, and the school claim they’re unable to open a case against him as a result. Agnes doesn’t want to press charges against him because he has a child – and if she’s treated like an inconvenience by medical staff and her school, who’s to say the police would be any different? So Agnes internalises her pain. Over the course of the next four years, she lives her life in the same apartment she shared with Lydie during grad school, and teaches at the same college she used to attend. There’s an unspoken sense that Agnes can’t quite move on from the place; she sleepily haunts it, unable to find closure because no one – except Lydie – understands or acknowledges what happened to her.
It’s the banality of enduring a sexual assault that Victor captures so well in her film; how the trauma lingers long in the body, even when you keep insisting to everyone (including yourself) that you’re fine. When Agnes begins a tentative romance with her sweet neighbour Gavin (Lucas Hedges) she doesn’t quite know how to respond to his affection; when she has a panic attack in her car, a gruff sandwich shop owner (John Carroll Lynch) coaches her through it and then makes her some food. These small moments of kindness – as well as the beautiful friendship between Agnes and Lydie – glimmer like flecks of gold on the bottom of a murky riverbed, demonstrating there is still some good in the world despite what happened to her. Good that also exists in Agnes’ cat Olga, who she finds on the street as a kitten days after her assault, even if she eventually has to euthanise a mouse left in her bed.
This surprisingly violent mercy killing feels like an oddly cathartic moment for Agnes, who is symbolic of thousands of people who never receive justice after being assaulted, and reflects the strange rhythms of Sorry, Baby – a film which doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but certainly understands the burden of shame placed on sexual assault survivors, and how navigating the world in the aftermath of assault feels like walking through dense fog, blinding reaching for a hand to guide you to the other side.
