Let’s be honest: A movie about sexual assault is a hard sell. For a long time, the subject was broached mainly in exploitation films and well-meaning but difficult-to-watch “issue dramas.” The makers of The Accused, an Oscar winner from 1988, seemed to think that depicting the incident in painfully graphic detail was the only way to convince the audience the survivor wasn’t lying.
As the voices of survivors have gained more prominence in media, however, stories about this often-hidden crime have taken new forms — creatively oblique, even darkly funny (see sidebar for more examples). Eva Victor’s debut as a writer-director, the Sundance Film Festival hit Sorry, Baby, is a case in point. As of press time, see it at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier.
The deal
Agnes (Victor), a young English professor at a coastal liberal arts college, receives a visit from her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who is happily married and newly pregnant. Agnes, by contrast, lives holed up with her cat in the woods and entertains occasional amorous visits from a neighbor (Lucas Hedges). As the friends reminisce about their years in the college’s graduate program, it becomes clear they’re talking around a “bad thing” that happened to Agnes.
The film’s next section slips backward in time to show us Agnes and Lydie as students eager to impress their thesis adviser, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi), who effusively praises Agnes’ work. In this hothouse academic atmosphere, where every topic is fair game for arch, ironic discussion, no one worries much about maintaining teacher-student boundaries. But when Decker asks Agnes over to discuss her thesis at his home, things go too far.
Will you like it?
Sorry, Baby opens with a long shot of Agnes’ home before anyone enters the scene, encouraging us to consider everything a house can represent — a safe refuge, but also a potential cover for “bad things.” The image foreshadows a later sequence in which the camera rests on Decker’s house as afternoon fades into night, allowing us to guess at the events inside without showing us.
Though we soon learn the details from Agnes herself, those exterior long shots send a strong message: This movie is not about the crime of rape per se. It’s certainly not about the perpetrator, whose predation tactics are depressingly run-of-the-mill. It’s only briefly about Agnes’ dynamic with him and her sense of betrayal. When Agnes declines to bring charges against Decker, it’s not just for lack of physical evidence but because, she says, punishment won’t change him into a different person — the better person she’d thought he was.
Sorry, Baby is about Agnes herself, who isn’t defined by the “bad thing” that happened to her but must still figure out how to live in its aftermath. The film’s nonchronological narrative unfolds over several chapters, each with a title reminiscent of a “Friends” episode: “The Year With the Bad Thing,” “The Year With the Good Sandwich.”
The echo feels intentional, because this movie is often funny, albeit in a dryer, more Gen Z way than any network sitcom. Victor’s show-biz career started with comedy videos on social media, and Agnes’ absolute frankness and refusal of subterfuge feel well suited to that format. She’s literal in a deadpan way that teeters gracefully on the line between a comedy bit and a simple expression of how her brain works. When Decker tells her he wasn’t able to put her thesis down, she asks if it got glued to his hands, not missing a beat. Finding a stray kitten in the street when she’s struggling to put her life back together, she cuddles it for a few seconds before announcing gruffly, “Well. I guess I love you.”
We all have stereotypical notions of how people respond to trauma: weeping, paralysis, flashbacks. Sorry, Baby asks us to think about more individual varieties of violation — and healing. Among the latter, there’s that sandwich, offered by a sympathetic stranger (John Carroll Lynch) at a tough moment. Also sustaining Agnes is her beautifully depicted friendship with Lydie, with whom she has a running banter no one else shares. Even Lydie’s family life seems unlikely to threaten their bond, although Agnes has fraught feelings about her friend’s newborn, who gives the movie its title.
Lydie also gives a name of sorts to the crime when Agnes can’t, saying, “It sounds like … it is. It’s the bad thing.” In this movie, avoiding the word “rape” — clinical, legal, impersonal — isn’t coy or a form of self-censorship. It’s about keeping the focus where it belongs: on the person who endured the “bad thing.” And lived to tell.
If you like this, try…
“I May Destroy You” (12 episodes, 2020; HBO Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Michaela Coel’s Emmy Award-winning miniseries broke new ground in the fictional depiction of sexual assault and its aftermath. Like Sorry, Baby, it’s as much comedic as serious, without making light of the issues it raises.
“Baby Reindeer” (seven episodes, 2024; Netflix): Created by and starring a comedian — Richard Gadd — this brilliant series got everyone talking with its unsettling portrayal of a struggling standup who can’t shake a female stalker.
The Tale (2018; HBO Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): In Jennifer Fox’s thoughtful film, which deals with the shifting stories we tell ourselves about trauma, Laura Dern plays a woman coming to terms with the fact that she was abused by a trusted figure as a child.
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2025.
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