Sorry, Baby

In an interview with the Guardian, director and actor Eva Victor described the effect of trauma on life this way: “it’s like a stone gets shoved into the river of your life. There’s a lot of pain in trying to remove it and you can’t. […] You just have to find a way for the water to move around it. It’s so unfair that someone threw a stone into your life. It’s hard to wrap your head around any of it.” It’s a powerful image to describe the before and after when a caesura occurs. It makes the decision to follow Agnes through a few years of her life in a non-chronological way more powerful. A kind stranger she meets at a horrible moment, when she has a panic attack in her car following a revelation about a friend and enemy, tells her that three years are a long time but also not that much time. She talks about how being immersed in the memory of her rape is horrible, but sometimes it’s even more awful to find herself not thinking about it at all. Maybe these years unfold like memories, which people don’t access chronologically but randomly. Healing from trauma is not a straight line, a clear process with constant improvements. 

The film begins with a visit from Agnes’ best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie). Their closeness and intimacy shines through every scene they share. This is before the viewer knows much about either of these characters, and so much is communicated just through how they are around each other. There is quiet concern from Lydie about Agnes’ well-being, a question about how much she leaves the house. There is specifically horror about her now having an office at the University, where she is a full-time lecturer, that was previously occupied by someone who has done her harm. 
A time jump returns us to before: Agnes and Lydie are working on their dissertations. Their advisor is Preston (Louis Cancelmi). He obviously favours Agnes over the other students and is over-complementary about her writing. She may have a crush on him. One day, he invites her over to his house. We don’t follow her into the house – we see her walk in, and then, after a period of time, leave in a rush, clearly distressed. She gets into her car and drives home to Lydie, where she haltingly talks about what happened. 
What struck me about that distressed retelling of the rape, the individual and escalating steps of not accepting her refusals and seeing her as a person with agency over her body, is how difficult she finds it to make it into a coherent narrative: it’s filled with questions, with doubts. Lydie throughout is supportive and gentle. She doesn’t push or judge. It stands in contrast to what happens when they go to a doctor the next day and experience the horror that awaits rape survivors after the worst thing has happened. The doctor is pushy, aggressive in his questioning, abrupt. Calling it poor bedside manners doesn’t begin to describe how horrible the experience is, or how much worse it may have been if she didn’t have an advocate by her side who calls the doctor out for his clear inability to approach the situation appropriately. A similar thing happens later, when the panicked University administration tells Agnes that there is nothing they can do because Preston has resigned before she brought her accusation. There will be no accountability. The two women tell her that they understand what she is going through because “we are women”. It’s such an unbelievable statement after they’ve told her they will do nothing that Agnes has to ask them to repeat it before it sinks in. 

In another scene from her life, Agnes is called up for jury duty and finds herself asked to recount having once been the victim of a crime when a lawyer asks her if that experience would impede her ability to be a juror. It’s a reminder of how surprisingly these moments of being pulled back into her worst memory can pop up, and she refuses to share what happened with these strangers because they have no right to her story. It’s also, in the broader sense, a judgement on the narrowness of procedures can never encompass the totality of the very personal experience, not unlike the way in which the narrowness of the gender categories on the form she has to fill in force her to pencil in a third option. “I don't want him to go to jail. I want him to stop being someone who does that. And if he went to jail, he'd just be someone who does that, who's now in jail.” she explains, before she’s excused. 
Along with these deeply unpleasant encounters that showcase how difficult it is to find any kind of accountability or justice the film portrays some moments that are almost magical in nature. She finds a stray kitten just when she needs it, and it allows her to pick it up and adopt it on the spot. A neighbour the house over is haplessly lovely (one of the funniest scenes of the film is when she asks to borrow some lighter fluid, clearly intending to use it for something other than a barbecue) and becomes a companion when Lydie moves away. The film isn’t saccharine enough to promise instant healing, and even these moments of grace come with the realistic portrayal or pet ownership (the kitten brutally mauls a mouse that Agnes has to mercy-kill) and the possible mismatches of romantic relationships (Gavin in essence tells her that she will one day want children as a fact, having no idea how far off that kind of long-time planning is for Agnes at the moment). 
The film provides such an interesting balance of comforting companionship (the kitten, Lydie, the kind stranger) and the human equivalent of irritating barbs – the only way I can describe the great Kelly McCormack’s (Killjoys, A League of Their Own) character Natasha is as a weaponised version of Anya in Buffy, a person unhindered by any traditional concepts of manners and politeness. Natasha is deeply jealous of everything that Agnes has and treats her like her worst enemy, and there is nothing that Agnes can do to change the fact. Natasha is terrible at a dinner party, and appears to regularly peek into her classroom furiously, resenting that she has attained the highly competitive full-time position. Finally, Natasha grudgingly accepts that Agnes may have, from her perspective, everything, including being likeable, but that she has so far not managed to win her over. Agnes has suffered a terrible trauma, but it’s almost like the presence of the constant, completely irrational irritation of Natasha is a reminder that life continues irrespectively. 

One of my favourite moments in the film follows Agnes into her classroom, where she teaches contemporary literature. It’s clear that she deserves the position but there is a heartbreaking moment where the University tells her she received recommendations from former teachers, one of which echoed what Preston said about her dissertation – extraordinary. It’s an irrefutable reminder of how entangled the rape is with her current career, but then, in the classroom, the film captures how good she is at her job, how confident with the students and the material when they are reading, of all things, Nabokov’s Lolita, and she explains to them the conflict between the beauty of form and the horrors of the content. 

The most moving moments of the film lie in Lydie’s concern for Agnes’ well-being, the precarious balance between her own life moving on excitingly – embracing her queerness, marrying her partner, having a baby – and returning to Agnes, who still lives in the same house and now occupies the office where her rapist once worked, and teaches in his former classrooms. Lydie recognises Agnes’ continued suffering – at one point she pleads with her not to die, and I think she means it literally and in terms of not making her life smaller and smaller. In the final scenes of the movie Lydie visits again, this time with her partner and baby, and Agnes looks after the baby while they go on a walk on their own. She has a moment where she talks to the baby about the future, about wanting to be the kind of person that she can talk to about everything, especially the scary things, without judgement or fear. 

This is a beautiful debut film from Eva Victor, and one of the best films this year. 

2025, directed by Eva Victor, starring Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Kelly McCormack, Lucas Hedges, Louis Cancelmi, Hettienne Park.