Sorry, Baby explores some serious subject matter in a darkly funny yet emotionally tender manner.
Major spoilers ahead, you’ve been warned so don’t get mad later.
Haven’t we all had Good and Bad Things happen to us at some point? In one moment, you’re on a high thanks to a Good Thing, only to be brought crashing down to reality by a Bad Thing. Sometimes a Bad Thing is so fundamentally awful it overwhelms any Good or even Merely Serviceable Thing. For all the positive support you get, you also receive some utterly rubbish advice. Before you know it, you’ve adopted a stray kitten, several years have passed, your BFF is having a baby, and you’re still stuck dwelling on the Bad Thing. Life just goes on huh?
Sorry, Baby is basically all of that packed into a tight 104 minute movie. And what a movie, easily one of the year’s best.
Writer/director Eva Victor has not only crafted a darkly funny yet emotionally tender movie about trauma, but Sorry, Baby also one of the most honest renderings about what happens before and after a Bad Thing (we’ll get into what this is in a sec).
The movie opens on a Good Thing when Lydie (a fantastic Naomi Ackie) visits Agnes (also Victor, who is so so good) from New York City and the joy emanated by their reunion is palpable. As we learn more about their friendship and Agnes’ life, something is off. Why hasn’t Agnes left this cold sleepy town? Why did Lydie come visit in the first place? What is up with their ‘friend’ Natasha (a scene-stealing Kelly McCormack) being a pass-ag buzzkill during their friend catch up?
As Sorry, Baby unfolds over four non-linear chapters (each starting with the title ‘The Year With…’), we gradually learn that Agnes was a promising grad student whose thesis was noticed by her professor (Louis Cancelmi). He invites her to his home to chat about said thesis, only for the aforementioned Bad Thing to happen. This has a profoundly traumatic effect on Agnes, who struggles to process and adapt to her new Bad Thing-tainted reality.
Victor doesn’t care about what exactly happened – we know very early on what’s going to happen – and is more focused on the details being gradually revealed to us at the same time Agnes herself is figuring stuff out. There are the typical ‘trauma tropes’ we’ve seen in movies before – like panic attacks, sleepless nights, and existential questions – but Victor deftly balances the various tones and sensibilities in a way that it feels truly lived in without feeling trite.
In the immediate aftermath of the Bad Thing, Agnes goes to see a doctor and also has to deal with a couple of highly-strung university lawyers. There’s an awkward callous vibe with a dash of cringe humour in both scenes, yet it all works as everything comes across authentically as “we’ve all had to deal with these types of people doing their jobs and ultimately not really caring about me in the slightest.” I mean, how often has something awful happened to you, only for something dumb or strange happen that broke the tension?
Whenever the darkness from the Bad Thing threatens to rear its ugly head in Sorry, Baby, Victor finds space to slot in a bit of light and occasional deadpan humour. For all the serious subject matter being tackled, this is also an unexpectedly joyful movie about friendship and empathy. Moments of mundane comfort – like Lydia and Agnes shooting the shit, and Agnes finding some physical solace in the arms of her neighbour Gavin (Lucas Hedges) – help keep the Bad Thing from being an overwhelming shadow looming over everything.
It’s not until the third and fourth chapter when Sorry, Baby really clicked for me on a thematic and emotional level. Time has passed and what should’ve been Agnes’ biggest Good Thing has become inextricably interwtined with the Bad Thing as she gets a full-time teaching offer but it merely replaces her old professor’s role and she has to move into his office. Yet Agnes doesn’t let it stop her from trying to move on and she accepts it – even if it pisses off an irrationally angry and jealous Natasha.
Processing and healing isn’t as simple as having one major moment of self-actualisation and that’s that. Everyone goes at their own pace and it’s an ongoing thing. Agnes is making small steps towards moving on, but so has everyone else because they’re under no obligation to wait until she’s “better”. It’s okay to sometimes have the Bad Thing lure you back into the abyss occasionally, but it’s also equally okay for everything around you moving on. Life simply goes on.
While it may be impossible to fully recover from the Bad Thing, Agnes realises there will be more Good Things to come that will balance out the bad – like finding a stray kitten in the middle of the road (cat distribution system at work there), finding out Lydia is pregnant, or even finding a minor bit of catharsis after mercy killing a poor little mouse.
Sorry, Baby is a wonderful movie that captures the complexity of life’s mundanity with a raw exploration of some serious subject matter. Eva Victor has set the bar extremely high on her first time directorial and screenwriting effort, and I can’t wait to see how she will continue chronicling all the Good, Bad, Weird, and Funny things life has to throw at us.