This film started a bidding war at Sundance. I can see why

FILM
Sorry, Baby ★★★★
(M) 103 minutes

I found it handy to know that Sorry, Baby’s writer-director, Eva Victor, began her career as a stand-up comic.

It helped me to make sense of the film’s tone, made up of a shifting stream of deadpan jokes and deadly seriousness.

Eva Victor in a scene from Sorry, Baby.Credit: Philip Keith

It’s already been a great success, sparking a bidding war at the Sundance Festival and winning the award for best screenplay. Victor’s lead performance has also attracted plenty of attention and I can see why. It has a resounding ring of truth, as if the presence of the camera had gone unnoticed. And the narrative has the same air of immediacy, bumbling along in the seemingly unplanned way that characterises real life.

It begins with a reunion. Agnes (Victor), a lecturer at a liberal arts college in an out-of-the-way part of New England, is welcoming her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who has come to stay with her for a few days.

The two were classmates in the college’s graduate program but Lydie has moved to New York while Agnes has stayed on, living alone in a cottage on the edge of a wood. Lydie is gay and Agnes may be. Their intimacy suggests that they may once have been lovers.

Naomi Ackie and Eva Victor as Lydie and Agnes.Credit: Philip Keith

But as the weekend goes on, their conversations hint at some tragedy in the past. An extended flashback taking us back four years then reveals that Agnes was raped by her professor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi), a personable and perceptive mentor who had put her up for a full-time teaching job.

We don’t witness the assault. The camera remains stationed outside Decker’s house, marking the passing of time with the darkening of the sky until the moment Agnes runs out of the front door, desperate to get away.

It’s the aftermath which interests Victor, who keeps us guessing about Agnes’ state of mind. She has a chronically wary look in the eye, as if she’s permanently poised between total scepticism and an irresistible urge to laugh. But it gradually becomes clear to us is that the rape has changed her life and that her residual anger and frustration are coloured by confusion and wonder. She still can’t believe that she could have trusted someone who turned out to be so despicable.

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These reflections are leavened by adroitly placed touches of the ridiculous. The college’s bureaucracy is gleefully sent up. So, too, is Agnes’ obsessively jealous fellow teacher, Natasha. Canadian actress Kelly McCormack seizes the role with such wild-eyed wackiness that you can’t take your eyes off her. On a contrasting note, Agnes’ gift for the deadpan is more subtle – seen at its best when she adopts a stray kitten, whom she talks to as if it were another adult. Coming across it, lost and mewing, in the street, she goes so far as to ask for its consent before picking it up.

She’s a genuine eccentric in a genuinely eccentric film and it took me a while to adapt to its oddness but once you get its measure – and Victor’s – it leaves you with a lot to think about and appreciate.

Sorry, Baby is in cinemas from today

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