I love when you walk out of the theater after seeing a really good movie and everything just feels crisper. Then, you google everyone involved, get excited to chat with anyone who’s seen the movie in question, and find yourself still thinking about it weeks later. Here’s one movie from this year that did it for me…
Sorry, Baby bowled me over. Eva Victor’s directorial debut, which they also wrote and starred in, follows Agnes through a few years of her life, sequenced out of order. There’s “The Year With The Baby” and “The Year With The Really Good Sandwich,” but also “The Year With The Bad Thing.” When Eva shared the movie poster on Instagram, they confirmed that “nothing bad happens to the cat.”
Instead, it is Agnes to whom the bad thing happens. “I wrote this film because there’s a part of my experience of trauma that I haven’t seen on-screen often: the part where you’re confused,” Eva said during a Sundance interview. “I spent years floating, just trying to accept that I went through something bad.” The movie “honors those years lost,” as they put it. To write the script, Eva holed up in Maine one winter with their cat and many cans of split pea soup.
The warm friendship between Agnes and Lydie (Naomi Ackie) is the central love story animating the movie. But, as Lydie’s life carries her away from the small town where they met during grad school, Agnes feels stuck. Getting an impressive teaching job at the university means staying in a place marred by a devastating experience during her time as a student. “Bad thing” is a euphemism, but also, with its childlike clarity, a perfect description.
Offering a really moving portrait of trauma’s reverberations and one person’s recovery, Sorry, Baby is also very funny. In the theater, I laughed a lot and cried a little. I loved Agnes and would’ve been happy to spend a hundred years with her. Of the movie’s reception, Eva recently told the L.A. Times, “I keep hearing, ‘Oh, Agnes is so awkward.’ I’m like, ‘What the hell?’ I’m very humbled by people’s reactions to how bizarre they think that character is because I’m like: ‘Oh, I thought she was acting legitimately normal, but okay.’”
What’s been your favorite movie so far this year? If you saw Sorry, Baby, I’d love to know what you thought.
P.S. What are your top three movies of all time, and what movie can you watch over and over?
(Movie stills and poster from A24. Gif from Tumblr.)
