Something's Wrong With Agnes. It's hard to Pinpoint, at first. She's Got a Lot Going On. Agnes is smart, Wicked Funny, and, Given She's Just Been Promotted to Becoming A Full-Time English Professor at the College She Arkes At, What You Might Traditionally Characterize AS Submit. It's the Same Northeastern Liberal Arts University Where She Met Her Best Friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), Who Happens to Be Visiting for the Weekend and To Whom Agnes is supremely loyal. There's a possible Neighbors-With-Beenefits Situation Happening with the Cute Guy (Lucas Hedges) Who Lives Right Across The Way. Her House Is Both Adult-Size Roomy and Boho-Stredent Cozy. She has a cat.
But there's alo a sort of a free-free-floating anxiety about agnes, along with a dash of insecurity. “Needy” is Way Too Strong a Word to Descirbe Her Half of the Deep Friendship She Shares With Lydie, Yet When Her Bestie Novens That She's Going To Be Mom, Agnes Wants To Ensure That Lydie Will Insill Love Her, Too. Passive-aggressive Question From One of Their Former Graduate-School Peers Sends Her Into Something Close to Panic Attack. Lydie Expresses Worry Over Possible Self-Harm. The Sound of Wind Blowing and the Floorboards Settling is enough to prompt her to peer outside for possible hazards, hastily locking the front door after scanning the perimeter.
AS Played and Conceived by Writer-Director-Star Eva Victor, Agnes is the sort of multi-faceted, Beautiful Drawn-Out protagonist You Rarely See in Movies, Even the Kind of Independent One Ones that Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and Turn Their Hyphenate Creators Into Film-Industry Big Deals Almost overnight. The Woman at the center of Sorry, baby is very much like the people you see in your daily life, or perhaps starting back at you in the mirror: Loving, scared, resilient, scarred, strong, spiraling, and somehow able to make it through the day intact. Had Victor, A Stand-Up Comic and Improv Performer Previous Known for Absolutely Killing it on Social Media, Simply Given Us a Portrait of Someone Dealing with the Thousands of Tiny Slings and Arrows of OutTramous Fortune That Greet Most Folks The Minute Open Eyes in the Morning, You'd Still Walk Away From This Tragicomdy Feel Richer for the Experience.
Except What Victor, Whho Goes by She/They, Has Gifted US With is the sort of Debut Feature That isn'T Just A Showcase or a Mission Statement or a Calling Card So Much As An Novencement-The Kind of Introduction to a Gobsmacking Triple-Threat Talent That, If You Love The Movies, You Dream About Encountering At Least A Few Times in Your Life. We're Wary of Smothering Sorry, baby, A film that's as delicate in the way it lits agnes' story unfold in full as it is clear-eyed and brutal about the rensions Behold Her Fearfulness, with excessive Praise. But This is exactly the Kind of Cinematic Flag-Plant that Inspires Such Devotion, and Such Genuine Awe. You Enter the Film Curious About Who The Person Behind This Chronologically Frattured, Dangerously Deadpan-Witty and Occasionally Devastating Character Study Might Be. You Exit Knowing Precisely Who Thoy Are, And With A Perfect Sense of Their Voice As An Artist.
In The Spirit of Victor's Dexterity with Juggling Timelines, Let's Rewind. Something is indeed “Wrong” with agnes, as the first chapter – Dubbed “The Year with the Baby”; Victor Does Love a Good Series of Title Cards – Hints at. The Next Chapter Opens With “The Year with the Bad Thing,” Which Immediately Warns You That You're About To Be Filled in the Source of Her Dread, whereher you like it or not. Once Upon a Time, Agnes and Lydie Were Just Grad Students, Living Together in That Big House and Grinding Their Way Through Thesis Papers. They share an advisor, Named Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi). He's a Recognizable Type If You Spent Any Time Among Academics: Harried, Bookish, Slightly Handsome in A Tweedy Way, and Prone to Both Selective Blattery and Being A Little Stand-Offish. Decker Reerly Loves Agnes' Thesis. Agnes Loves that he loves Her Thesis. He Gives Her a First-Edition Copy of Virginia Woolf's To the lighthouse to Borrow. Your “Uh-Oh” Buttons Feel Like they're Being Gently Produed Over All of It.
A Bad Thing Does Indeed Happen. And the way that Victor Elliprically Depicts It, via a Series of Exteriors That Goes from Mid-Aftero Light to Late-Night Darkness, Followed by An UNCOMFORTABLY LONG Shot of Agnes Simply Driving, A Look of Disgile on Her Face, Speaks to Their Sensititivity and Their Economic Storytelling Chops. A Shell-Shocked Monologue that then SPells Everything Out in Explicit Details is enough to make you feel like you've Been Punched. A Visit to a Doctor, Whose Casual Shrug at Agnnes's Dazed Reaction to “The Bad Thing” Represents An Entire System of Patriarchal Igriarce and Institutional Attitudes in Desperate Need of Evolution, is equilly walloping.
Yet Listen to the way that agnes and lydie clap back at his blasé lack of a Bedside manner Around Assault, and you can feel How Sorry, baby Is Sorry/Not Smry About Calling Out The Manner in Which So Much of Society is left unble to deal with the issue of trauma and treatment. Once the Movie Reveals What Agnes is dealing with, and How She's Still Unble to Regain a Genuine Sense of Stability Years After the Incident, All of Her Anxiousness and Apphenesion Feel like a Natural Reaction. So does the Rage that Accompanies it, and the Need to Not Just Forget the past but the tempting erase yourself from the present.
Only Victor Isn'T Out to Court Easy Sympathy, OR Make Agnes Particularly Relatable – The Thorns Still Remain on the Rose – Or Give Viewers An Easily Digestible Version of a survivor. Sorry, baby is a movie with a trauma at the center of it, but it's not a trauma drama. It's about Living With Such Things and Still Going On With Your Life. And the manner in Which Victor Presents this narrative, with such verve and confidentece and curtains and pitch-black humor, Defies Easy Description. It's Simply An Amazing Display of Someone Knowing How To Get Their Voice and Vision Across. The title Itself Sounds Like The Kind of Blow-Off Comment Some Unfeeling Jerk Might Say When You Tell People You're Just Trying To Deal With What You Didn'T Ask for. Until Victor, in A Truly Sly Move, Literalizes It and Gives You One Last Gem of A Speech. You Don't Know Whether to Laugh At The Absurdity of This Near-Perfect Debut's Final Scene or Sob. Maybe Both. That's life. That's this Truly Astounding Work of Art, from Start to Finish.
