Eva Victor’s directorial debut, Sorry, Baby, tells the story of Agnes, a literature professor. Played by Victor, Agnes lives in a New England town and works at a small liberal arts college. We first meet her just after she has received tenure, when an old friend, Lydie, played by Naomi Ackie, comes to stay. As Agnes and Lydie, who is now pregnant, catch up with their small circle of university friends, we start to sense a trauma hanging over Agnes’ life, despite her recent professional success. Sure enough, the film jumps back in time to the end of her masters degree, when her professor, Preston Decker, played by Louis Cancelmi, invites her to his house to discuss the dissertation, and then forcibly comes on to her, even as she protests that she is not interested in his advances. The rest of the film follows Agnes’ efforts to process this trauma with the help of Lydie and her neighbour Gavin, played by Lucas Hedges, with whom she begins a tentative relationship as part of her ongoing healing. She also has a few random encounters with incidental figures whose stories contour her own.

There is no doubt that Victor is presenting a powerful story and one that needs to be told. Nevertheless, the style of the film feels quite out of time, often redolent of the most sanctimonious and dogmatic tendencies of the late 2010s. Much of the dialogue reminds me of the fixation, during that era, of scripting “appropriate responses” into TikTok aphorisms or Twitter announcements, especially when Agnes and Lydie come across people who can’t fully comprehend Agnes’ traumatic experience. Again, I am sure these situations happen in real life, and are a genuine problem, but within the world of the film these recurring figures play as arbitrary nemeses, opportunities for moralistic pointscoring. At times, it even feels like the film is willing some of these nemeses to be problematic so that it can engage in the jouissance of correcting them. When an emergency room doctor tells Agnes to “Calm, down ma’am,” Lydie promptly responds, “we need a tonal shift,” and most utterances are just a beat away from the “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but…” trope.

Again, this is so redolent of the highly curated speech that emerged in the late 2010s, designed to divest language of anything remotely or residually problematic. While that may be a noble project in theory, it makes for a fairly wooden screenplay, and results in what I can only describe as empty virtue-signalling, whether it’s a pointed shift to Lydie reading Giovanni’s Room, or Agnes raising her eyebrows in amusement-contempt when the juror next to her notes that she has ticked off both “female” and “non-binary” on her form, despite the fact that he hasn’t really said or done anything to exhibit disapproval. In another film these might be natural moments but here it feels like so much mugging for the camera, a box-ticking exercise to ensure that the film fulfils all the right credentials. Admittedly, the stiltedness of it all stems in part from Agnes’ shellshock in the wake of her trauma but there’s a rote quality to the screenplay that goes above and beyond that. When I first saw Victor in Billions, my reaction to them was the same as when I first glimpsed Olivia Colman in The UK Office – I felt that this was a remarkably charismatic actor who deserved a bigger vehicle. I still feel that way but, for me, Sorry, Baby doesn’t really offer that opportunity.

This brings us to perhaps the most distinctive and interesting tension of the film – the dissonance between the downbeat naturalism of the mise-en-scenes, which are shrouded in New Hollywood desuetude and gorgeously stark New England landscapes, and the utterly unnatural style of the dialogue that takes place within them. Nowhere is this clearer than in the characterisation of Gavin, the film’s best shot at an unproblematic man, yet who is nothing more than an automaton, an object lesson in robotic, risk-managed charisma. Agnes’ first university class as professor opens with a student reading out an excerpt from Lolita, “And it struck me, as my automaton’s knees went up and down,” and while this leads to a predictable denunciation of the “disgusting” Nabokov, it echoes a deeper facet of the film: a tendency towards rote automatism in the face of a linguistic sphere that is deemed problematic beyond repair. This rehearsed quality is most depressing when it’s paired with quirk, soul, humour, or any other traditionally charismatic qualities, all subsumed to a highly sanitised response to trauma. All these years later, after the backlash has settled, I still think Promising Young Woman was an extraordinary film, but many of the criticisms levelled at it – especially that it was a bundle of talking points, designed for “relevance” – feel more relevant to Sorry, Baby, which doesn’t aspire to Emerald Fennell’s aesthetic strangeness.

It makes sense, then, that the crisis of the film arrives with Agnes being enlisted on a jury panel, since beneath its drab surface, this is a screenplay that finds jouissance in judgment. Amidst heavy-handed discussions of reasonable doubt, circumstantial evidence and direct testimony, Agnes’ trauma becomes a pretext for an omnivorous selfhood (one of her friends tells her, in the closing scene, that she’s lucky for being hot and smart, and she blithely agrees). Despite the fact that other jurors have presumably suffered from crime, and the crime in question is very serious, Agnes is the only member who gives a speech about how trauma intersects with receiving tenure, as the judge approvingly notes: “Some would say that a good teacher makes a good juror.” Of course, part of the point of this scene is that Agnes’ experience cannot be properly litigated due to the misogynistic blind spots of the legal system, and so requires the trial-adjacent space of the jury selection pool to find expression, much as Agnes suggests she might work best in an ancillary “civic” role to the jury system, operating in tandem with institutional justice but not entirely subservient to it. But this is yet another moment when it’s hard to take the film’s vision of trauma in good faith, so bound up with is it the sententiously hypercurated nature of the screenplay.

Perhaps you could say, then, that Sorry, Baby is attempting to deconstruct naturalism itself, to capture the inherently problematic nature of everyday dialogue, in a kind of counterpart to Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. No doubt, there is something interesting and provocative about these naturalistic New Hollywood backdrops paired with ultra-scripted speech. But in the end this feels like a world of pointscoring, hyper-regulation and TikTok/ Twitter aphorism, in which correcting other people (or wanting to correct other people) is the main ingredient of everyday discourse. Even when Agnes meets Lydie’s baby, Lydie’s partner Fran, played by E.R. Fightmaster, is quick to correct her: “It’s Jane, not Janie.” It’s fascinating that this has received universal acclaim while Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt has been all but disavowed by the film academy – the latter is certainly more accomplished technically, and also approaches its subject matter with considerably more ambiguity and ambivalence – and much better acting – but doesn’t seem to have made the same impact.

There was one part of Sorry, Baby that I did find more original – buried somewhere beneath the more recognisable trauma narrative is an elegy for the small town English department. Everything about academia in the film is pitched to the same microcosmic scale. Agnes is one of a group of five students who graduated the same year, a bit like the clique in The Secret History, and their reunion reiterates the smallness of their world, with all of them still enmeshed in the power dynamics of their lessons and the minutiae of their respective theses. Likewise, the liberal arts college itself is a tiny building, easily legible in a single shot, and becomes the blueprint for the way Victor shoots exteriors more generally, from the exterior of Agnes’ home, always framed by the enormous wooded fields around it, to Preston’s house, which Victor films in a sustained long shot over afternoon, evening and night as the assault takes place, in an echo of the closing images of John Carpenter’s Halloween. Inside the liberal arts college, there is only one expansive roundtable classroom, while the corridors are so narrow that people have to squeeze past each other when walking in opposite directions. Even Agnes’ thesis was on smallness, the art of the short story, while the curriculum features writers who favoured fragmentation and immediacy: Woolf, Sontag, Didion, Hughes. We never see any other subject being taught here either.

All of these features work quite beautifully to evoke the peculiar intensity of being immersed in a tiny humanities class (again, The Secret History comes to mind) but also seem to elegise the decline of these small-scale courses as we know them. In a world where humanities departments are under ever-increasing pressure, I found this elegy for the joy of teaching, and being a student in, exquisitely curated courses to be so much more compelling than the film’s continuous curation of everyday conversation. Of course, Agnes herself receives tenure early on, but the fact that this comes after her assault, the fact that Preston offers himself as one of her referees, and the fact that she eventually occupies his old office, all makes her achievement feel like fruit of the poisoned tree, tainted and foreclosed in ways that can’t easily be traversed. For me, Sorry, Baby was most effective when it unfolded as an off-campus film, or a campus-adjacent film, suspending us between Agnes’ particular trauma and the plight of her department as a whole, with Preston as sign and symptom of both. Unfortunately, these moments were somewhat few and far between, although between them, somewhere, subsists the charm that Victor brought to Billions.