Sorry, Baby review - the healing power of friendship in the aftermath of sexual assault

“I have a baby in me,” says Lydie (Naomi Ackie; Mickey 17). “What? Right now?” says her friend Agnes (Eva Victor), who may not be entirely thrilled at the news. “Are you going to name it Agnes?”

Eva Victor (Rian in Billions) stars in, writes and directs their debut feature, which was produced by Barry Jenkins’s production house, Pastel. It’s divided into five sections, beginning and ending with The Year with the Baby. Its silly humour can be irritating, as can the dialogue, and it’s not as incisive as Girls, Fleabag or I May Destroy You, with which it has some themes in common.

But it addresses, in an unusual, off-beat way, a serious subject: sexual assault and its complicated aftermath. And it’s a vivid portrait of a friendship, with compelling performances from Victor and Ackie, beautiful shots of illuminated houses in the dark-blue night and an atmospheric score from Lia Ouyang Rusli.Agnes and Lydie (pictured above) were university room-mates; Agnes has stayed in the same New England college town in the same isolated house they shared when writing their theses, and has just got a full-time job on the English faculty - the youngest person to be appointed in 50 years, as her less successful and caricature-like rival Natasha (Kelly McCormack) remarks, adding, “Bitch.”

Lydie, who’s visiting Agnes in the first scene, has moved on: she’s gone to New York, become “super-gay”, fallen in love, got pregnant and married a woman, Fran (ER Fightmaster) who Agnes doesn’t like much. It’s clear that, despite her academic success, things are not easy for Agnes. “It’s a lot, still being here,” says Lydie, looking worriedly at her old friend, as they lie on the beach, wrapped up against the cold. “It’s a lot to be anywhere,” replies Agnes.In the next section, The Year with the Bad Thing, we find out what happened to Agnes four years back. Her professor and thesis advisor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi, another Billions star) is a charmer, and he and Agnes admire each other’s work. She tells him how his novel resonated with her, how she thinks about it all the time. Well, he tells her, he couldn’t put her thesis down. “It’s extraordinary,” he texts her later – a word that comes to haunt her - after their meeting is curtailed when he has to leave to look after his sick kid. He shows her his first edition of To the Lighthouse, and she smells it appreciatively. What a delightful professor, one can't help thinking.

“You should fuck him,” advises Lydie, as she struggles crossly with her own late thesis. No, says Agnes, she doesn’t want to, and if he asked her, she’d be upset and would say no, but thank you. That polite refusal isn’t allowed to play out. Decker reschedules, asking Agnes to come to his house. We watch his Hopper-esque clapboard house from across the street as afternoon turns into evening and the lights go on.

Later that night, a shaken Agnes gives Lydie a blow-by-blow account that will be familiar to many. After some kissing, she seems to have spent hours trying to fend him off, moving his hand away again and again. “His fingers were strong and hard, in a bad way. I didn’t want them to be doing that.” He breaks a button on her trousers. When she finally manages to get away, she sees his face. “It was scared.”The two visit an unsympathetic male GP (“We need a tonal shift,” Lydie informs him), who tells Agnes she should have gone straight to the police rather than having a bath and destroying the evidence – true enough, but she just wants reassurance about STDs. In a farcical meeting, two university admin staff utter platitudes about taking it really seriously because they’re women too, but as Decker has suddenly left and got a job upstate, the university can bear no responsibility. Later Agnes and Lydie plan to burn his office down, which seems a remarkably pointless plan, or perhaps burn something smaller, “like his hair or his pens.”

But what’s clear is that Agnes doesn’t know what to call the bad thing. Was it rape? She isn’t sure, and she doesn’t want him to go to jail because he has a kid and anyway, what good would it do. A miserable state of traumatised confusion sets in. When she’s alone, the house terrifies her, and she sticks pages from the fateful thesis on to the bare, exposing windowpanes. Did Decker actually hate her rather than admiring her work?

She finds a kitten in the street and brings it home, which helps (though she's driven to bash a mouse the cat's brought in to death with a book, which may be symbolic but just seems deranged), as does having awkward sex with her gentle, odd neighbour Gavin (Lucas Hedges), who’s more enthusiastic than she is.

Three years after the assault, now occupying the same large office that Decker had (and it does seem a little too neat that she's catapulted into his job), she has a panic attack and tells the friendly sandwich shop guy (John Carroll Lynch), who helps her breathe, that she can still “feel in my body that it was really bad. But sometimes I don’t think about it, which is weird.” In the final scene, Lydie's new baby, Jane, provides a hopeful note, even though Agnes can't help seeing the inevitable difficulties that lie ahead for her. All she can do is promise that she’ll be there to listen when Jane needs her, just as Lydie was. “I’ll say, yeah, I know, it’s just like that.”

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