Eva Victor is a voice to be reckoned with. After accumulating a small but full-force fandom in the comedy circuit, she has arrived to sit down and discuss the hilarious topic of… sexual assault. Except her approach isn’t to submerge this story into pure miserable grimness, it’s to see if she can have a laugh despite the heavy subject and somehow she pulls off that miracle tightrope. No, Sorry, Baby is not an all-out laugh riot. Often Victor will attempt a joke that even her character knows isn’t landing in the room, but who needs to laugh at all when the real joke is the system that allowed her to fend for herself in the aftermath of her assault. The real joke are the college administrators who cannot provide clear and optional methods to take after her predator, her former professor, abandons his job to inevitably just go teach somewhere else. 

We begin the story somewhere in the middle of the timeline, where Victor’s character Agnes is greeted both by her excited classmate and former roommate, Lydia (Naomi Ackie) there to announce the thrilling news that she is pregnant, as well as her new neighbor Gavin (the delightfully warm and endearing Lucas Hedges, finally back on our screens after a short hiatus) coming over unexpectedly to the surprise of Lydia. Agnes’ trauma has already occurred and is painting emotions over her face she can’t control, despite the event having happened three years in the past. That’s where we flash back to the grim “Year When the Bad Thing Happened” (as the chapter title describes), and Agnes is a highly ambitious English major turning in her thesis paper into her charming Professor Decker (the always great to see in recent films and television, Louis Cancelmi). Of course, things turn south when Decker asks a bit more out of Agnes than she is expecting and oversteps his boundary by a large mile, kickstarting both the plot and Agnes’ personal journey of self-recovery.

Victor keeps the discussions of assault with seriousness and honesty, while exploring the odd and awkward ways that the people around her try to behave and navigate the space around her. She knows people see her differently now that she’s a victim and she isn’t sure how to handle it. Her life will often put pressure on her when she least expects it, causing her to have panic attacks in her car and adopt a cat off the street just to take advantage of any type of emotional support that the universe bestows upon her. 

Agnes knows that no one is doing anything particularly wrong and understands that her personal journey is one she has to fight completely by herself. She can’t even villainies her abuser for fear of disrupting the innocent family members he has, knowing it’s not worth destroying their lives to ruin his. She’s willing to take all the suffering in her own hands and navigate through it. No amount of tender love and care from Ackie and Hedges’ characters is going to heal everything, but she is able to find little eccentricities with the life she’s dealt with to find pockets of relief, and that’s enough of a start.

With her dynamite debut feature, Eva Victor has found a truly unique route into rewriting the standard recovery story, creating little vignettes of observation that challenge her character every step of the way, giving her windows to laugh, windows to cry, and find a way, not to move on from her trauma, but to live around it.