In Sorry, Baby, written and directed by first-time filmmaker Eva Victor, Victor plays Agnes, an English professor at a college in a woodsy, cozy sweater-demanding Massachusetts town where she lives alone with a never-endingly mewling cat in a creaky old house. It sounds, on paper, like a pretty nice living situation, but the more time we spend with Agnes, the thornier and more worryingly self-isolating it seems. A few years ago, a fawning adviser (Louis Cancelmi) assigned to oversee her thesis at the same school assaulted her during an at-home office hour — an act the film intimates with a protracted time-lapse of his house’s exterior — and the incident has, understandably, subsequently kept her in a sort of stasis, uncertain how to move forward. 

Best known as a comedian who, over the last few years, garnered some online notoriety with front-facing-camera sketches and a staff position at the satirical feminist website Reductress, Victor details the aftermath with an emotional clarity consistently cut through with the wry sense of humor that had shone through in smaller bouts in those aforementioned creative venues. Sorry, Baby is drily funny in a joking-through-the-pain kind of way that manages to only deepen its devastations. Some fine instances of its tonal command are found in a scene where two women department leaders cynically invoke their gender to unconvincingly signal concern for Agnes’ assault, about which they do nothing because the professor resigns and flees campus the following day, and in another where Agnes bumbles her way out of jury duty by abstractly insinuating what happened to her to the case’s prosecutor (Hettienne Park), whose initial bewilderment gradually transforms into obvious-in-her-eyes sympathy.

Read the full review at 425.

Image credit: A24.