By Nicole Veneto

In a film that maintains a deft, tightrope balance of tone, writer-director-star Eva Victor has delivered an acerbically funny depiction of how we learn to cope in a world where bad things can (and often do) happen.

Sorry, Baby, directed and written by Eva Victor. Screening at AMC and Coolidge Corner Theatre

Agnes (Eva Victor) finds a new friend in Sorry, Baby. Photo: A24

In Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, a young woman struggles to heal in the aftermath of a deep personal betrayal through friendship, a burgeoning career, and various other coping mechanisms including but not limited to small animals and gallows humor.

Coincidentally, I have just described the last 11 months of my life.

This will be a slightly different kind of review than what I am normally used to writing, because Sorry, Baby is something I watched in the context of a fairly recent ordeal. A bad thing happened to me last year that I need to talk about. Someone I trusted revealed themselves to be deeply manipulative and cruel, using their words to build me up only to tear me down. I was caught in a terrible cycle that took too long to recognize as such, never mind remove myself from it. I’ve told my family, my friends, and my colleagues, but the weight of it still sits heavy in the pit of my stomach. It wants to come out. The more I’ve suppressed it, the more it’s eaten away at my insides. But to talk about it publicly means finding the right words to describe not only what happened, but how deeply it upended my life.

In reflecting pieces of my own experience back at me, Sorry, Baby offers an opportunity to process the bad thing that happened through a medium I’ve found great comfort and catharsis in. It’s a film about trying to find stability after the rug has been pulled out from underneath you, and of learning how to move on when you’re still stuck in the past. In a film that maintains a deft, tightrope balance of tone, writer-director-star Eva Victor — another addition to the year’s exciting new multihyphenates alongside Annapurna Sriram — has delivered an acerbically funny depiction of how we learn to cope in a world where bad things can (and often do) happen.

For Victor’s Agnes, the bad thing that happened was a sexual assault. While completing her graduate thesis, Agnes’s advisor, the idolized novelist Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi), invites her to his home so they can discuss her “extraordinary” work. This is where Victor sets Sorry, Baby apart from other films of this type. There is no rape scene. Instead, Victor and cinematographer Mia Cioffi Henry lock the camera down outside Decker’s house as day turns to dusk, dusk to nighttime. Agnes eventually emerges, hurriedly putting on her boots as Decker hovers in the doorway. The camera trails behind Agnes as she walks back to her car, detached and outside her own body. Someone off-screen says her shoes are untied. When we finally see Agnes’s face through the windshield, she looks gaunt. Upon returning home to her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie), she says her pants are broken.

Comedy and tragedy are interlaced perspectives on the same course of events. The morose sense of humor of the witty and awkward Agnes is a way to process the bad thing she can’t bring herself to call “rape.” To Victor’s immense credit, Agnes’s asides never descend into one-woman shtick à la Fleabag. Her sarcastic retorts don’t undermine encounters with an insensitive attending doctor or the university’s woefully ineffectual administrators. These aren’t fourth-wall breaks or insufferable ad-libs: just the personal language she uses to steel herself against the shame and powerlessness of the situation at hand. To paraphrase Lydie — after Agnes adopts a stray kitten some weeks later — it’s what she needs to survive.

When something traumatic occurs, there’s a desperate need to preserve and reassert personal boundaries that have been violated. Your world becomes smaller as you retreat into yourself, the cost of which is that a piece of you stays rooted in the bad thing that happened. I know this all too well. So does Eva Victor. The narrative mirrors this stagnation and Agnes’s fragmented recollections by jumping back and forth in time. Things change during the four years after the assault: Agnes starts teaching at the university and hooking up with her sweet neighbor Gavin (Lucas Hedges), Lydie moves to New York to start a family, and the kitten grows into a mouse-killing adult cat.

What stays the same is the specter of trauma that haunts Agnes’s life. There are reminders everywhere: creaking noises outside her door, boots stashed in the hallway closet, an overly competitive peer (Kelly McCormack) who is still jealous about Decker’s undue attention toward Agnes. Closure doesn’t come easy, if at all. The only thing we can really do is learn how to cope through whatever means necessary. But recovery isn’t a linear journey. For every moment I seem to have finally freed myself from the trauma — making a breakthrough in therapy, cutting my hair, letting a friend read out loud all those horrible correspondences to the disgust and laughter of everyone in the room — it’s followed by a setback.

Like Agnes, I’ve had plenty of bad days since the bad thing happened to me. My entire body is seized with anxiety, irritable and terrified of anything that even tangentially reminds me of who caused it. Sometimes these feelings turn into full-out panic attacks. Sorry, Baby’s standout scene broadly resembles an experience I had. In the midst of one such panic attack, Agnes pulls into the parking lot of a seasonal sandwich shop on the side of the road. The owner (John Carroll Lynch) knocks on her window to tell her they’re closed, and she can’t park here. He sees her gasping for air and immediately coaches her through a breathing exercise, until she calms down. The two talk over a sandwich, where Agnes reveals to this kind stranger that she’s still trying to get over a bad thing that happened to her three years ago. “Well, that’s not much time,” he says.

Neither is 11 months, for that matter.

I may not have a British best friend, a kitten, or veteran character actor John Carrol Lynch in my life, but I do have family, friends, and a wonderful boyfriend whose patience and understanding have provided a lifeline through my darkest moments. Watching and writing about Sorry, Baby is another step toward coming to terms with the bad thing someone did to me. When I got home from the screening, I did something brave: I finally told my father what happened last year. He listened calmly,  but nonetheless was angry that I had been hurt and taken advantage of. Shortly after we got off the phone, he sent me a text: “Things have a way of getting resolved. Focus on the good things in your life. I am always here for you. I love you very much. You are doing great things, this is a hurdle that unfortunately is a part of life.”

As my mother likes to say, “This too shall pass.”

Agnes will eventually find a way to heal and move past the devastation one person caused. One day, hopefully soon, I will too.

Nicole Veneto graduated from Brandeis University with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, concentrating on feminist media studies. Her writing has been featured in MAI Feminism & Visual Culture, Film Matters Magazine, and Boston University’s Hoochie Reader. She’s the co-host of the podcast Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema. You can follow her on Letterboxd and her podcast on Twitter @MarvelousDeath.