SORRY, BABY. Telling Trauma Without Losing Viewers

In 2021, Parul Sehgal, an American literary critic, published in The New Yorker a widely discussed essay entitled The Case Against the Trauma Plot, directed against a certain troubling narrative trend. The key term in Sehgal’s text, “trauma plot,” refers—putting it very simply—to a popular (in Sehgal’s opinion, far too popular) storytelling formula in which the protagonist struggles throughout the narrative with painful experiences from the past. In such a structure, the theme of trauma dominates over every other aspect of the work—rather than developing characters and weaving in interesting secondary storylines, the creator focuses almost exclusively on exploiting the protagonist’s suffering.

It’s true that this often builds empathy for the character, but the cost is the reduction of his or her identity to nothing more than reliving the past. For Sehgal, the “trauma plot” appears as a structural trap, one that is all too easy to fall into if a film or novel is built on some horrific event that continues to haunt the protagonist for years. In her debut Sorry, Baby, Eva Victor skillfully avoids this trap.

A side note, important in the context of what follows: Eva Victor is a non-binary person who uses two sets of pronouns (they/them and she/her). For the sake of linguistic clarity, I decided to use feminine pronouns in this review.

The key event in Victor’s debut is rape. To her credit, the director does not turn it into a major mystery—we learn of it quite early, in the film’s second chapter (Sorry, Baby is told in a very literary manner: episodic and non-linear). The assaulted character is Agnes, played by Victor herself—a promising PhD student in the Department of English Literature. The man who harms her is her supervisor: a friendly, if somewhat sluggish, writer who teaches at the university as a side gig. Victor does not show the act of sexual violence itself—on the one hand respecting the privacy of the character she plays, and on the other trusting the power of suggestion. When Agnes enters her supervisor’s home—believing she is there to discuss her dissertation progress—the camera stays outside.

A quick ellipsis, a single sharp cut, and suddenly we are hours later. Agnes leaves the building, but her life will never be the same.

Sorry, Baby—like all the stories Sehgal places within the “trauma plot”—is therefore first and foremost about coping with an extremely difficult experience. One that paralyzes, that festers, that marks its victim—at least so it seems—for the rest of her life. The struggle with trauma is thus, to some extent, a struggle for subjectivity: a painstaking battle not to be defined by the evil experienced years earlier. Victor understands this perfectly, which is why she avoids the pitfalls of such narratives. She achieves this through several clever devices.

First, she stretches the film’s storyline across several years and divides it into short chapters, presented in an achronological order with no temporal continuity. In this way, we receive a comprehensive account of everyday life before, during, and after the trauma. Fragmentation and non-linearity serve Victor’s story well—they allow us to notice unexpected connections between scenes, showing how a painful past resonates across many different aspects of Agnes’s life: from her university work to a grotesque sexual relationship with a neighbor (nice to see Lucas Hedges on screen again), to the sudden summons for jury duty, when the violence she endured becomes an obstacle to serving in court.

Second, at no point does Victor allow trauma to become the sole subject of the film. Of course, it plays a crucial narrative role and structures the story, but it never overwhelms the viewer, blotting out other compelling threads. Sorry, Baby is also, for instance, a beautiful film about female friendship and mutual support. Agnes’s life is immeasurably enriched by Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who accompanies her in her darkest hours—always ready to listen, advise, or simply stand up for her friend, as in the scene of a surreal conversation with an extraordinarily tactless doctor. The succession of episodes with which Victor fills her debut is striking in its variety and thematic range.

My personal favorite remains the chapter in which Agnes, overwhelmed by a sudden panic attack, is helped by a passing stranger (in this case, a sandwich shop owner) played by John Carroll Lynch. The conversation that follows—universal in tone and reaching far beyond the specifics of sexual assault—is a true masterclass in acting and screenwriting, and makes it clear why Sorry, Baby received the Sundance Award for Best Screenplay.

Third and finally, Victor infuses her film with a wealth of sharp situational humor, which balances the darker passages and allows the audience to catch their breath. A biting, exceptionally intelligent sense of humor becomes Agnes’s most effective weapon in facing reality.

Like BoJack Horseman or Fleabag, the wounded heroine sometimes hides behind a mask of (self-)irony, creating distance from the world around her. Healing, in this sense, is the slow removal of that mask, the shortening of that distance. The measure of Victor’s artistic success lies in the degree of emotional investment with which we root for Agnes on her painful yet also moving and often funny journey. And it’s truly hard not to be touched, and not to smile, when in the final chapter we see her beautifully finding her way forward.