Sorry, Baby is the sort of film that’s hard to write about. Which is irritating if writing about it is exactly what you want to do. But not giving the whole game away probably makes for a more rewarding viewing experience for anyone intending to watch it. Without letting the cat entirely out of the bag I can say that it’s a coming of ager and an issue drama, though it wraps its issue up in a character study, which it approaches obliquely without being too dogmatic.
It’s also a campus drama. The sort of thing you might get from writers like Malcolm Bradbury or David Lodge, Philip Roth or Michael Chabon if they weren’t so dick-focused. And there is a light and almost mocking tone to the whole thing, initially at least, until The Issue raises its head and things get much more serious (without ever becoming too earnest).
Two young women at college. Agnes (Eva Victor, who also writes and directs) and Lydie (Naomie Ackie), galpals and confidantes who get something to get confidential about when Agnes gets herself into a bit of a situation with a professor. Decker (Louis Cancelmi) is quite handsome and a bit of a campus celebrity on account of a book he wrote a few years ago. Agnes is slightly in awe of him, and it’s possible that she has been flexing her chest at her professor slightly more than she should. Maybe their relationship has shifted slightly further away from the teacher/pupil ideal than it should have done as well.
Which does not excuse what happens. Or does it? The interesting thing about Victor’s film is how nuanced it is. That and the sudden shift in tone from the light and semi-comic to the angular and halfway back again, as Agnes processes what has happened to her, also processes the fact that the campus authorities are not going to help her much.
Agnes does move on but she does it in fits and starts. From one sub-par relationship after another, Victor’s film follows her episodically, almost as if these were condensed episodes of Friends minus the jokes – The Year with the Baby is followed by The Year with the Bad Thing, The Year with Questions and The Year with the Good Sandwich, before ultimately arriving back at The Year with the Baby, Agnes still not quite on an even keel but more certain of her place in the world.
I wondered if Lena Dunham in her Girls period was an influence – how young women negotiate their way in life. But there’s also something of Phoebe Waller-Bridge about the film’s stance (interested in relationships but not in sentimentality) and about Victor as a person – tall, gimlet eye, fiercely intelligent, pretty, bookish, wayward and with a tendency to grimace at the camera. There was an episode of Killing Eve (Waller-Bridge’s creation) called Sorry Baby. I offer that as an observation only rather than as an attempt to rest my case.
Victor also pegs herself as a they – I realise that sentence is internally inconsistent – and shadowed Jane Schoenbrun on I Saw the TV Glow to prepare for this. This is not as weird as that, but it does insist on taking people as they are rather than trying to force them into a pre-conceived box. The “they” issue is not “rammed down our throats” – as the phrase usually has it. This is a drama about complex human relations first and foremost, interestingly written and played.
This is Victor’s first movie after a very self-referencing online series, Eva vs. Anxiety, which was a series of episodic cringe-dramedy situations more obviously in the Larry David zone. Sorry, Baby demonstrates Victor’s talents are broader and deeper than that and that she can sustain drama over the long haul. She has talent to burn.
Sorry, Baby – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
