Sorry, Baby

You can probably guess what it is. “Whenever I tell people,” she adds, “they look really scared for me.” The incident is never shown directly, with writer, director, and star Eva Victor instead placing her camera outside the house where it occurs for an uncomfortably long time. The abrupt timelapse shifts from day to evening to late night over the course of an agonizing minute or so, with grad student Agnes (Victor) finally emerging from her thesis advisor’s two-story abode with her boots still untied before driving home in silence.

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Sorry, Baby is a movie of understatement and elision that deftly mimics its traumatized heroine’s process, over the course of several years, of figuring it out as she goes. Agnes never brings her case to the police, later explaining that she doesn’t want the man responsible to go to jail, just to no longer be the kind of person who does what he did. With chapter titles like “The Year with the Bad Thing” and more humor than its subject matter suggests, the movie is as effortlessly charming as its protagonist.

It’s also awkward and uncomfortable, sometimes in a way that befits the material and sometimes in a way that’s just ungainly. Jumping around in time and touching on everything from academia and the healing power of kittens to post-traumatic stress disorder and jury selection, Sorry, Baby can’t help feeling a little messy. Neither can recovery, though, and if progress isn’t a straight line then movies don’t need to be, either. A hit at Sundance, where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, Victor’s affecting debut feature opens in limited release today ahead of a wide theatrical rollout next month.

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The immediate aftermath of Anges’ assault is given just a few minutes of screentime, seemingly to emphasize the institutional roadblocks that consistently fail victims like her. Her male doctor is actively unhelpful, while the female representatives of her university are comically inept; by Victor’s reckoning, it takes all kinds to perpetuate rape culture. Agnes’ journey is a poignant evocation of the cruel feeling that, as your own world appears to be ending, the world around you keeps spinning as though nothing has happened at all.

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The one exception is her ride-or-die bestie and roommate Lydie, who offers to burn down their thesis advisor’s office and simply says “whatever you need” when Agnes returns home with a stray kitten one day. Naomie Ackie is as wonderful here as she was in The End of the F***ing World, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, and Mickey 17, with Lydie not only keeping Agnes’ head above water but matching her deadpan energy. Humor might be a defense mechanism masking deeper sorrow for the two of them, but there’s nothing wrong with faking it till you make it.

The movie is as effortlessly charming as its protagonist.

Agnes’ thesis concerns short stories, and one of the film’s most memorable scenes echoes an exemplar of the form: Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing.” In the story, a grieving mother who lost her child in a hit-and-run accident is comforted by the baker who was originally making the boy’s birthday cake and instead ends up feeding her. In the film, Agnes pulls into a sandwich shop’s parking lot while hyperventilating and is walked through a breathing exercise by the proprietor, who then makes her a sandwich. “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” writes Carver in the story. Agnes — and, for that matter, Victor — would appear to agree.

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It helps that the sandwich maker is played by the ever-reliable John Caroll Lynch, a ubiquitous character actor whose presence has enriched movies like Fargo, Zodiac, and Shutter Island, but Victor’s writing, direction, and performance in the sequence are simply beautiful. Sorry, Baby is a film of small, good things, the kind that cut through despair, however briefly, and remind us that the way we feel in the midst of trying times isn’t the way we’ll feel forever.