Sorry, Baby

An exploration of trauma digs deep without getting to the bottom of things.

Eva Victor and John Carroll Lynch in Sorry, Baby. Image courtesy of A24.

Recovery takes time. Worse, it isn’t linear—a fact that Sorry, Baby understands down to the bones of its script. We meet Agnes (Eva Victor, who also wrote and directed the movie) a few years after something bad happened to her. She seems fine, but from the delicate way her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) talks to her, it seems as though Agnes shouldn’t be doing as well as she is. Sometimes Agnes is the most steadfast of anyone else around her, a woman taking on the petty rivalries of higher education (first as a graduate student, then as a professor) with grace. She euphemistically refers to what happened as “the bad thing” and nothing more. When her facade does crack, it’s by fractions of an inch.

Like the process of emotional healing, the movie itself is nonlinear, looping back in time to “the year of the bad thing,” then tracing Agnes’s life forward from that moment. By the time it returns to the point in time when we first meet her, she is at a level of recovery several years in the making. Victor’s script has a deadpan affect that suits its protagonist well: sometimes wry, sometimes rueful, always just a hair blunt. Agnes and Lydie share a dry sense of humor: the mortar that held their friendship together before “the bad thing.” After Agnes’s world crumbles, her sense of humor becomes a suit of armor. Despite all appearances to the contrary, Agnes is hurting; it just takes longer than expected for her to admit it.

The script walks a delicate line between funny and serious, even after Agnes’s life takes a sudden sharp turn. It mostly succeeds, largely because of Victor’s supporting cast. Ackie (who was terrific in Mickey 17 earlier this year, and who led Blink Twice last summer), is an anchoring presence. Lucas Hedges slips in as an affable neighbor named Gavin, a young man roughly Agnes’s age who understands her pain and loneliness even though he’s bemused by her off-kilter approach to the world. A less grounded performance would make Agnes and Gavin’s relationship seem twee, but Hedges finds depth with his line deliveries, playing his role as someone who is just as lost at sea as Agnes is. At one point, she asks him a question he’s been waiting to hear for a long time, and Hedges delivers his “yes” response with the enthusiasm of someone who’s been holding his breath without realizing it.

The film works best in its little details. Agnes is anchored by the small kindnesses from characters like Gavin and a sandwich shop owner played by John Carroll Lynch. Sorry, Baby also nails the irritations of higher education: the petty unkindnesses that spring from a classmate’s jealousy, the annoyance that comes with studying a single niche topic for years, the grating doublespeak of a university’s bureaucracy. Agnes covers the panes of her bedroom window with taped-up sheets of her master’s thesis—academia as protection from prying eyes. If the visual touch is on the nose, it’s because Agnes is sorting through the emotional equivalent of blunt-force trauma. At another point, she throws a pair of hiking boots into a paper bag and buries the bag deep in a coat closet, a motion born from impulse that still carries the weight of finality with it. From then on, we only see Agnes wearing running shoes; she is trying to escape the parts of her that she can’t leave behind because they’re buried too deep in her own psyche. The visual metaphor is a little broad, but it still works.

Unfortunately, like Agnes in her running shoes, the movie can’t quite escape itself. The metaphors are a little too neat, the landing too bumpy. It’s an ultimately sweet story dealing with bitter circumstances, a balancing act that closes out with a conclusion that feels almost too safe. Sorry, Baby understands that healing is cyclical, even as it makes the mistake of depicting the process with neatly tied-off ends and clean epiphanies. But the journey is enjoyable and the companions affable: a melancholy story with a sense of humor.—Sarah Welch-Larson

★★★☆

Sorry, Baby is in expanded release now.