Something very bad happened to Agnes. It’s hinted at in the first segment of Sorry, Baby, when her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) arrives for a visit, and asks Agnes (Eva Victor) if she feels comfortable having the office of their old English professor Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi). It’s fairly easy to infer what Lydie means by this, particularly once they go for dinner at the home of their former classmate Natasha (Kelly McCormack) and she snarkily remarks that Agnes was always “Decker’s favourite”. Lydie politely changes the subject and gives Agnes’s leg a reassuring squeeze.
There has been a deluge of films about sexual assault in the wake of MeToo, but for all the artistic capital (rightfully) afforded to survivors, precious little has materially changed within culture. Sometimes it feels as if there’s more resentment than ever towards victims for daring speaking up – it’s this reality that Eva Victor’s directorial debut (which she wrote and stars in) captures so well, in which a woman is sexually assaulted by a man in a position of trust, and the according fall-out is the lack of fall-out. Nothing in the world at large changes; everything does in hers, revealed in non-chronological order, with a chapter for each year following the assault. When she goes to see a (male) doctor following her assault, he chastises her for not going to the ER immediately afterwards. He seems completely indifferent to the traumatic incident Agnes has experienced; all Agnes and Lydie can do in response is laugh.
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What else can Agnes do? The perpetrator has already handed in his notice at college, and the school claim they’re unable to open a case against him as a result. Agnes doesn’t want to press charges against him because he has a child – and if she’s treated like an inconvenience by medical staff and her school, who’s to say the police would be any different? So Agnes internalises her pain. Over the course of the next four years, she lives her life in the same apartment she shared with Lydie during grad school, and teaches at the same college she used to attend. There’s an unspoken sense that Agnes can’t quite move on from the place; she sleepily haunts it, unable to find closure because no one – except Lydie – understands or acknowledges what happened to her.
