In a Language Beyond What Is Given

Tia Glista watches Eva Victor’s directorial debut, “Sorry, Baby.”

By Tia GlistaJuly 31, 2025

• Film

• Gender & Sexuality

IN THE SECOND CHAPTER of Eva Victor’s directorial debut Sorry, Baby, Agnes (Victor) is sexually assaulted by her graduate school advisor. The next day, her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) accompanies her to a doctor’s office to be screened for STIs, and the pair fumble with the doctor’s clinical diction: for Agnes, his description of the assault as an “attack” connotes images of someone jumping out from behind a bush, not the slow coercion and ambiguous predation of a trusted mentor. They bristle when asked if he “ejaculated” in her. Agnes and Lydie instead speak of the event with a different kind of precision, articulating what they need from the doctor and the context in which they are coming to him, not as victims of a crime but for healthcare. “I know this is hard to talk about,” he replies, shrugging. Lydie squints, replying, “It doesn’t feel that you know that.”

In spite of their obtuse doctor, in watching this scene, I felt that Agnes and Lydie were indeed very good at talking about sexual violence, at expressing all of the situation’s strangeness, nuance, dark humor, humiliation, and devastation, without ever overexplaining themselves or becoming didactic or precious or cliché (this scene is also, believe it or not, one of the film’s funniest). This is how femmes talk to each other about trauma, I thought, in ways that make so much sense because of how they don’t try to overcome the fact that violence usually doesn’t. In other words, maybe it’s not that trauma is hard to talk about, but that it’s hard for some people to hear about it.

If this is true, then Sorry, Baby expertly and tenderly explores this dynamic of finding language with which to communicate traumatic sexual harm in ways that let go of the imperative to be polished, and are therefore so much more accurate, even as they might also be confusing or incomplete. The film also stages what it is to listen and bear witness: in Lydie, Agnes has a friend to whom she can explain what she is going through, but also doesn’t have to. “Whatever you need,” Lydie tells her when she comes home with a stray kitten, and Lydie means it. The pair are most often framed in two-shots, unified rather than speaking across cuts—the typical narrative of individual redress here is folded into a collective solidarity. When one speaks, the other listens—really listens—whether Lydie is supporting Agnes through the aftermath of the attack, or Agnes is supporting Lydie as she discovers her latent queerness and falls in love.

The scholar Cathy Caruth has argued that the traumatized body suffers from a crisis of language; perhaps it is not that trauma has no language, however, but that it is multilingual, speaking in different registers to different audiences, and not always finding successful translation. Though Agnes is understood by her trusted friend, we also see her try to explain her experience to medical professionals, to the university’s Title IX office, and, years later, to a lawyer when she is called for jury duty. Her language—“his fingers were hard, like in a bad way”—reveals the flawed ways in which survivors are imagined to testify and make their experiences clear and objective. “Like in a bad way” is a subjective qualification that doesn’t convey a concrete image, but it’s clear to a certain kind of listener what Agnes means. The same gesture or sensation that might be “right” in one context is soured and wrong in this one, and the language of the clinic or the court cannot hold these gradations of fact or translations of a body in shock. That the body speaks in a language that proliferates meanings is exploited by Agnes’s assailant, who repeatedly ignores her signs of refusal—moving his hand away, shifting to a different part of the couch, fighting to hold her pants on—however, in Agnes’s recounting of events, this same unclarity becomes a cause for a more complex empathy, an enrichment of the different ways in which we attune ourselves to others. Victor taps into these fits and starts of language (verbal or bodily), mobilizes their impasses and “flaws,” and spins a rich dialect of them.

Maybe it’s fitting then that Agnes and Lydie are graduate students in a literature department, trained in the vicissitudes of words and their myriad interpretations. (Though it’s clear that neither Victor as a screenwriter nor anyone else who worked on the film has spent time in academia, since while they are training to become professors, their program resembles more of an MA than a PhD. They are writing “theses,” not dissertations, and their cohort shares one adviser with whom they meet collectively, offering due dates and defending at the same time—all finished and employed by their late twenties.) When the film begins, Agnes has just been hired as the youngest full-time faculty member in the same department, while Lydie has moved to New York and is having a baby with her partner. They attend a dinner with their fellow grads, who laugh about nightmares of blank pages and all-nighters; Agnes, they assume, must not have bad dreams, because things came easily to her. She was the favorite of their adviser, the novelist Preston Decker.

The film then returns to “The Year the Bad Thing Happened” and we see the cost of this favoritism. Agnes later suggests that Decker’s preferential treatment means that he in fact hated her, because even if he praised her, he was incapable of respecting her as a “person who lives, breathes, and thinks for themself.” Thus, the Bad Thing happens after a campaign of flattery and building trust, culminating when Decker moves a meeting with Agnes from his office to his house across the street. Victor keeps the camera at bay outside the house, cutting as time passes and night falls; at first, the orange glow of the living room seems inviting and warm, but as the sun sets, the windows look more and more threatening, like glaring teeth. Finally, Agnes swings the door open and strides out without closing it behind her, slipping one boot on the porch steps, jaywalking across the road and heading, stunned, back to her car. She tells Lydie what happened and files a report with the university, but Decker has already fled to another college, and there is nothing they can do. A few years later, she fills his vacant post and works from his old office, unable to request a different one for fear she might have to explain why. Lydie visits, Agnes strikes up a bond with her shy neighbor Gavin (Lucas Hedges), Agnes reports for jury duty, and Lydie visits again, baby and partner in tow.

Sorry, Baby presents these events in distinct chapters, skipping forward and back in time in a manner akin to the ways that trauma also scrambles a neat order of events: memories that live next to each other in the body may not live next to one another in time. But just as a comment from a colleague, or the pair of hiking boots she was wearing the night of the assault, can draw her mind away again, so too can language: at first, when Decker circles lines from her thesis and comments that they are “extraordinary,” Agnes is bashful and pleased with herself, but when the same word appears in a performance review years later, it is an arrow launched from the past that pierces her perceived distance and safety from him. To be beholden to others’ desires is so often to also be trapped by their language; Agnes has dedicated her life to the incredible power of words and finds herself undone by just one. As she teaches her students Lolita in a course on the 20th-century novel, she helps them unpack the ways in which sparkling prose can hold dissonant, violent content. Language coerces and seduces, and it can unfurl us—like, in a bad way.

Victor’s physicality as Agnes simulates the sense of being dragged around, performing something like what Virginia Woolf, whom the film also references, describes in The Waves as the difficulty to “make one moment merge in[to] the next” with some natural grace of “liv[ing] wholly, indivisibly and without caring.” Victor’s movements are specific and endearing: she is hunchy and trudging, tall and angular, and under her massive anorak, one can imagine a limitless supply of wool sweaters, layered on top of each other. Victor seems, I noted at one point, like someone who is never barefoot, but always clad in big, thick socks. Her gestures do not float but fling themselves around, a slightly less staccato cousin to Greta Gerwig’s character in Frances Ha (2012), noted in that film for her “weird man walk.”

Agnes’s embodiment also belies an oblique relationship to femininity, one that she articulates in a jury duty questionnaire by filling the bubble next to “F,” adding another one before “M” and drawing arrows back and forth between them—yet another way in which she finds and expresses herself in a language beyond what is given to or expected of her (I’ve seen she/her pronouns used for Agnes in the film’s press notes, but Victor uses both she/her and they/them). Victor has described being sexually assaulted as “this time when you feel […] really unheard, and that someone decides where your body goes when you don’t get a choice.” Even in the aftermath of the assault, Agnes speaks of her bodily response mechanically: “I got up slowly, I grabbed my boots, I drove home, now I’m here.” In contrast to this dissociative state, directing was, Victor states in the same interview, cathartic in that “being a director who directed myself as an actor was this real special thing of telling myself where my body went.” As time passes, Agnes, like Victor, slowly begins to write new scripts for her body.

If Sorry, Baby speaks a language in excess of institutional or patriarchal norms, it locates healing and redress in similarly alternative modes: friendship, the companionship of a loyal cat, sex with someone who never feels entitled to it, reading, and pedagogy. Victor’s film also has a latent abolitionist streak: when called for jury duty, lawyers screening Agnes ask her whether she has ever been the victim of a crime, and whether she reported it to the police. Agnes explains that what she wanted was not for Decker to be punished, but “to stop being someone who does that, and if he went to jail, he’d just be a person who does that, who’s also in jail.” Though this point gets her excused from jury duty, it ironically paints a more potent image of justice than the system ejecting her. Without being bent on evening the score or punishing its villain, Sorry, Baby is beholden not to Hollywood’s dramatic vernacular of sexual violation—blood, sweat, panting, tense courtrooms, swelling music, sudden flashbacks, epic quests for revenge—but to something quieter.

Not the extraordinary, but maybe the ordinary.

As the film ends, Agnes bounces Lydie’s baby on her knee and makes a promise: if anything happens to them, they can tell her and she will listen; she won’t say that they are scaring her or become judgmental. Bad things happen and “it’s just like that sometimes. Sorry, baby.” The baby, of course, doesn’t have the language to know what Agnes is saying, but maybe they are still listening.