Pop culture has come a long way from 1980s cinema’s deployment of sexual assault as a gag (a la John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles). But the grammar movies and television use to dramatize such crimes remains by and large unsophisticated. Even #MeToo thrillers and biopics, the projects that on paper appear most likely to confront the subject with the deftest hand, have been known to whiff on their promise; they either treat the abuse as the character, as in Blonde, or the character as a cypher, as in Promising Young Woman, and as such, fail to fulfill their promise as cultural commentary.
Maybe these projects can be forgiven for the letdown; assault isn’t easy to talk about, to reenact on set, or to watch on screen. It might just take another perspective on the subject—say, that of a comedian—to compel pop culture to expand its visual vocabulary for telling stories about it. Enter Eva Victor, whose feature debut, Sorry, Baby, premiered at Sundance earlier this year to hosannas (including a screenwriting prize) and sold to A24 for a reported $8 million at a festival where buyers weren’t shelling out for much. Chief among its praises was that the movie depicts the utterly life-change effect of sexual violence on a victim while simultaneously depicting how the world continues to turn, inexorably, after they’ve been attacked. “Something bad happened to Agnes,” reads the official synopsis. “But life goes on – for everyone around her, at least.”
Victor’s background as a writer for sites like Reductress, and perhaps especially their Twitter video sketches (where they frantically rant about, for instance, the bright side of the USPS getting dismantled), inform the tone of Sorry, Baby. The humor comes easily but not at the expense of the somber reality it attempts to capture. Apart from writing and directing, Victor plays the lead, Agnes, a grad student in a small, rural town trudging through her days, coming to terms with an assault she endured by her…
