Sorry, Baby

Or: Little Home in the Big Woods

Eva Victor has a gift for framing. Writer and director and star of Sorry, Baby, their sense of proportions, of breaks and through-lines, in camera shots and narratives and delivery is nothing short of beautiful, living in the perfect in-between where you see picture being drawn in its technical mastery, and still feel captivated by it.

For example, dear reader: there’s a bit with a door (an innocuous, white washed door, with a friendly cow coat-hook on it). That door becomes terrifying, and skims Sorry Baby nearly into a psychological horror piece (the movie transmutes and flirts a whole bouquet of genres: thriller, comedy, mission piece, and platonic love story to name a few). That door has a terrible power, until suddenly it’s hypnotic presence is broken, simply by a shift in the camera. This happens all the time: huge houses stand cupped in a vast forests with their occupants hung suspended in the invisible stream of time. A street scene stands in for a long horrible act; its violence undeniably present but un-glimpsed behind lighted windows. Victor (and their cinematographer Mia Cioffi Henry) also bring closeups to work in for a depth usually only found in painting. Too close and it would be grotesque, invasive, too far and we would lose the whole world, or the utter lack of one, going on behind the characters eyes. (The artistry, the cunning of film craft is stunning; I would say exquisite, but that seems an inappropriate word in the context of the film).

Even the storytelling itself, at once seeming disjointed, falls into a perfect looping arc. We follow Agnes Ward (Victor) over the course of four years, though not necessarily in chronological order. A post-grad then professor at a small New England college, socially awkward but whip-smart and driven, her greatest delights her work in the English department and her inseparable souls-double Lydie (Naomi Ackie). However, as happens so terribly often, she suffers unexpected violence at the hands of her all too admiring advisor, Professor Decker (the credibly performing, but almost too well named, Louis Cancelmi).

Grief isn’t linear, and neither is growth. Agnes, in Victor’s hands bounds around. Some days, both before and after The Bad Thing, she’s poised, competent, someone in control of her life and sure, in the most true sense, of herself. Other times she seems untethered; not broken by her experience but with something blocked, or askew, inside her, always a half second off of the moment, with something begging behind her eyes to be seen. Most horrifying is total hollowness that Victor captures eerily well.

It’s far from total dreadfulness however. Victor, as well a writer and actor, is also an accomplished comedian (just look at Agnes try to smuggle a kitten through a grocery store, or share a barbs with Pete the Sandwich Maker (John Carrol Lynch), and there are many moments when jets of uncomfortable but heartfelt laughter bubbled up from my throat and kept going, helplessly. Many of these were thanks to Lydie, who gives a constant life affirming energy. Ackie’s performance sings, both grounded and totally irrepressible.

Sorry, Baby is rich in characters, and Victor-as-screenwriter shunts plenty of the laughs their way. These jokes can be cruel, like Agnes’s interview with a horrible doctor (Marc Carver) and a somehow-even-more-horrible-but-in-the-opposite-way administrator (Natalie Rotter-Laitman), or ridiculous like her frequent clashes with the Natasha the Ever Bitter (Kelly McCormack, pitch perfect and always funny, until the moment she’s not). Even small roles like the clerk in the legendary cat smuggling scene (Francesca D’Uva) or Walter the kindly dean (Tom Ford) feel full and connected, giving the sense that, however briefly we may touch on them, there is an ocean of souls out there, each with their own story.

Two particularly good performances match Victor’s energy exactly. One is Agnes’s kindly but hapless neighbor Gavin (Lucas Hedges). The script is particularly sparkling in their brief blushes as both actors square up to side-eye each other and bumble requests for sex and lighter fluid, like a horny gunslingers of social anxiety. E.R. Fightmaster plays Fran, Lydie’s spouse, who, though short of screen time, fizzes against their partner’s best friend (this is in the Platonic Love Story braid of the show). A particularly fun piece of casting and costuming is that Fightmaster shares a shocking similarity, in manner and countenance, to Victor (a fact that, in story, Lydie is blithely unaware of and Agnes and Fran most definitely are.)

Victor’s dialog is Annie Baker-esque: profound in its simplicities, opaque in its pronouncements, filled with the half-thoughts and sudden revisions of our every day speech. And, as far as Agens and Lydie are concerned, absolutely true to the painful love languages that spring between two best friends, those souls that truly understand each other. While I fear the story will not necessarily spark with everyone (people who hate time jumps, perhaps, or lovers of mice), its story, verbally and visually, is a masterpiece of subtlety that says quite a lot about unspeakable things.

At last word, dear reader, stay through the ending credits. Composer Lia Ouyang Rusli’s themes of understated beauty have built throughout the film to a full throated choir; the perfect compliment to the final moment. It is music as benediction, the last taste of the best possible meal, as moving and triumphant as the first shoots of spring.