Early on in Eva Victor’s A24 campus drama Sorry, Baby, former graduate-school classmates reunite over dinner and brief each other on their lives. There they are, four years after graduation, back in the sleepy New England town to which they sacrificed their early adult years. Some are now homeowners; others are married and living in New York. Time flies, the classmates collectively marvel. But the dinner’s pouty host, Natasha, interjects with a sour footnote. “Not for me, or for Agnes probably, since we’re still here, at this school.”
In a certain sense, Agnes Ward (Victor), the film’s unsteady protagonist, is enviably ahead in life. Already tenured at 29, she’s the youngest full-time literature professor her department has seen in a half-century. She occupies the sunlit office left by the group’s former adviser, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi) — naturally, it seems, since she was his obvious favorite. Agnes is charming, with a bumbling, deadpan sense of humor; her dimpled face always bears the trace of a smirk. But behind her unserious façade, she’s paralyzed. She still lives in the clapboard cabin that she shared with her grad-school roommate and best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who departed for New York years ago and is preparing for a family. “It’s a lot, right, still being here,” Lydie murmurs obliquely while visiting Agnes, both of them bundled up and lying in dead grass. Agnes shrugs off the comment: “It’s a lot to be wherever.”
Sorry, Baby captures the feeling of being the last one stranded in the liminal station of adolescence, waiting for rescue that may never come — and the slow, accompanying grief of watching your loved ones move ahead without you. “Don’t wait so long to come back,” Agnes says wincingly to Lydie before she drives away. I know the feeling. Nearly all of my close friends are in serious long-term relationships. Some have left our shared apartment; some have left New York entirely. I am now preparing to live on my own for the first time. I once believed that friendship could triumph over everything — geography, schedules, the general bureaucracy of living — but my idealism has eroded somewhat with age. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that much of Sorry, Baby takes place at a liberal-arts university, where romantics go to defer reality, to hold onto wondrous illusions about what the world should be.
Many observers see Sorry, Baby as a film about trauma, and it is. But more revelatory to me are the film’s quiet insights about intimate friendship and the anticipatory grief one experiences during tectonic realignments in the other person’s life. A partner, a baby — these things threaten to expose where a friend actually falls in their other half’s hierarchy, leaving them to feel like a placeholder for the “real” thing. Being “like a partner” is not equal, socially and institutionally, to being a “partner.” There is not the same promise of the future. Throughout the film, Agnes prods Lydie to reassure her of her place in Lydie’s life: “Do you still miss me, now that you’re married?” Agnes asks, a needy child.
Of course she does. The love between the friends is apparent from the first moments of the film, when they slip back into their old rhythm, cackling about men while knitted together on the couch. “For lots and lots of people in the world, the notion of ‘falling in love’ has sexual connotations,” the queer theorist Eve Sedgwick once wrote in A Dialogue on Love. “For me, it’s a matter of suddenly, globally, ‘knowing’ that another person represents your only access to some vitally transmissible truth … and if you lose the thread of this intimacy, both your soul and your whole world might [be impoverished] forever.” I’ve always loved this quote, extravagant as it is, because to me it accurately captures how monumental friendship can be. The film makes note of Lydie’s absence in the bed she and Agnes once shared. “Do you think you want the stuff that everyone has — like a family or whatever?” Agnes’s neighbor and occasional hookup Gavin asks her one day, spooning her in the bathtub. Agnes replies with indifference. “Probably just to keep Lydie closer … I don’t see myself getting older or having kids. I don’t see myself at all.”
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Agnes is held back by what she can only acknowledge as the “bad thing”: her assault by Decker in grad school, a narrative void never displayed directly onscreen. We witness the events around it. Warm with admiration, Becker calls Agnes’s dissertation “extraordinary” in their meeting. She praises his first novel, “how fucked-up it was, and how it felt like a reason that I was alive.” There seems to be a mutual camaraderie between them that Agnes rejects as romance. “Well, that sucks,” she replies, after Lydie suggests he is attracted to her. “Do you think that’s why he calls me smart?” Decker switches the location of their second meeting, and the camera stays on his house’s exterior, sky fading from blue to black. Then, Agnes stumbles home, pants broken, to Lydie.
In the immediate aftermath of the assault, Agnes’s faculty for language evades her. The professionals she speaks to probe for hard facts, seemingly oblivious to the sensitivities of the person to whom those facts happened to. “Were you raped?” a male doctor bluntly asks Agnes the day after her assault. It’s technically the right word but feels hostile. Lydie offers relief from the burden of explanation. She translates her friend’s erratic moods: “If you need someone to burn his office down, but you don’t want to do it, I will do it,” she says, after Agnes suddenly arrives at their home with lighter fluid. One day, Agnes scoops up a stray cat on the way to the grocery store. Lydie accepts it without hesitation: “Whatever you need.”
Across the years, Lydie processes developments of her own. She is queer, a post-grad-school revelation, with a sober-minded partner, Fran (E.R. Fightmaster), whom Agnes resents. (Victor said in an interview she wanted Agnes to confront a “more evolved, grounded, knowing version of themself, the most triggering possible person for their best friend to be with forever.”) Agnes’s own romantic desires are murky. The sex she has with Gavin is awkward and dutiful, the result of some obscure emotional necessity; she seems to find hooking up with men dissatisfying, and it is unclear whether her ambivalence predates her assault. Filling out a jury-duty form, she creates a new bubble for her gender and fills it in, along with “female.”
Part of the beauty of friendship, when it lasts, is that it accommodates many different versions of the people in it. But the lack of formal constraint is also what creates insecurity, especially when there’s an imbalance of need. When one person disappears into the noise of their own life, it is hard for the other know what kind of reaction they’re entitled to and what happens next. Grief is inconvenient; it traps us in the past. In Sorry, Baby, Agnes craves a more secure bond between her and Lydie. She’s excited by Lydie’s pregnancy announcement, but a part of her refuses to acknowledge it. Talking about Lydie’s sperm donor, she muses, “Maybe I should have his baby too and then they can be brothers.” Maybe then they could be real family.
Lately, I have felt lot of grief in my friendships, even though the friends involved aren’t dead — just a version of life between us. In the best case scenario, the grief can forge something new. Sorry, Baby ends with Lydie and Fran visiting Agnes, their new baby, Jane, in tow. Alone with Jane, Agnes vows to extend the same quiet understanding that Lydie once offered her: “If you want to kill yourself with like a pencil or a knife or whatever, I’ll just say, Yeah, I know, it’s just like that sometimes,” Agnes says. “I’m sorry that bad things are going to happen to you.” Trauma is inescapable, the movie seems to say, but it’s who helps you through it that matters. What we see seems like the beginning of a new kind of love.
