Sorry, Child evaluate – a heat, bitingly humorous refocus of the trauma plot | Sundance 2025

By now, a full week into Sundance, it’s clear that the indie movie competition is in a little bit of a hunch. Whereas the Utah fest boasts a formidable and impassioned slate of documentaries this 12 months – I haven’t seen a dud but, and I’ve seen many – the narrative choices have largely fizzled on impression. Loads of lovely pictures and atmospheric vibes, aimless plot and unearned craving.

Which made the premiere of Sorry, Child, comic Eva Victor’s characteristic debut as a writer-director, an particularly brisk breath of recent air on Monday night time. Sharply written, neatly structured and well-acted, with a star-making flip from Victor herself, the 93-minute black comedy will not be solely nimble and constantly humorous, however top-of-the-line, most sincere renderings of life after sexual assault that I’ve seen.

Trustworthy, in that its curiosity is simply that: life after, not the occasion itself, which has sadly been given gravitational weight in so many different handlings of the topic put up #MeToo. Sorry, Child reconfigures the settings of the now de rigueur trauma plot, which tends to present the Unhealthy Factor annihilating power, wringing suspense and function out of the query of what occurred to her, or the reveal of very dangerous males. Trauma as totalizing identification, downward spiral, anticipated aspect.

One thing dangerous did occur to Agnes (Victor), an English professor at a Bowdoin-esque school in rural New England (filming passed off in Ipswich, Massachusetts). Her finest pal Lydie (Naomi Ackie) alludes to it within the movie’s first of 4 chapters, titled The Yr With the Child, with the trailed off vagueness of the lived and understood. Agnes’s life has inched ahead whereas Lydie’s has galloped – Agnes lives in the identical home as grad college, teaches in the identical program, now has His workplace; Lydie is married and constructing a household within the metropolis. However it’s one involved word of many of their reunion, which the 2 actors carry out with irresistible intimacy throughout plausible beats: catching up, bodily closeness, the massive questions and validations, the interruption of a neighbor (Lucas Hedges) that Agnes could or will not be fucking. Hints of despair, however the predominant tone is pleasure – the fun of being with the one individual for whom you’ll be able to drop all facades (and in addition, a welcome rebuttal to the concept that friendship essentially wanes post-partnership).

That sensibility – lightness shaded by the previous, constant jolts of deadpan humor – helpfully frames the movie’s return to the occasion itself, just a few years earlier (I’m personally happy that Sorry, Child has a stable grasp on its timeline). Again then, Agnes and Lydie have been roommates in the identical grad program, Lydie the charming slacker to Agnes’s prime scholar, who receives particular, talent-affirming consideration from their adviser Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi). Trainer and scholar textual content and flirt and categorical mutual admiration; Lydie jokes they need to simply have intercourse, Agnes demurs. Victor finds an ingenious technique to keep away from depicting the dangerous factor whereas nonetheless conveying the time elapsed and the wordless shock after.

However it’s fortunately not a thriller, to leak out over time; Agnes tells Lydie in plausible specificity what occurred – a totally convincing efficiency of mutating shock from Victor, and of empathy from Ackie – and Lydie confirms, yeah, that’s the factor. These are usually not naive ladies. They summarily embark on all the required selections – go to the hospital? Go to the police? Report back to the division? Agnes proceeds as many do, with a destabilizing mixture of denial, doubt and livid certainty, which Victor renders with aching specificity and bristling humor paying homage to Fleabag (it helps that Victor, a willowy brunette, additionally resembles Phoebe Waller-Bridge).

Victor has a deft and refreshing deal with on the absurd conditions, unnerving ironies and compelled inevitability of transferring ahead, how sexual assault can shred one’s self-confidence however not destroy you. Agnes remains to be sensible and humorous and endearing, capable of construct a instructing profession and new, tentative relationships; she can also be haunted by a nasty expertise inseparable from her profession. Generally you concentrate on and really feel the lure of the abyss; different occasions, as she says in a single particularly poignant scene with an acquaintance performed by John Carroll Lynch, you don’t give it some thought in any respect. Life goes on.

Sure parts of Sorry, Child are dialed up a bit too excessive – an uncaring expertise on the physician’s workplace exaggeratedly callous in a means we’ve seen earlier than, a jealous and socially awkward work rival (Kelly McCormack) a shade too intense for the movie’s uncommon, delicate naturalism. However with out sensationalism or over-statement attribute of the nascent style, Victor brilliantly illustrates the expertise of aftermath in its mundanity, its small joys, its ache, its unusual companionships. Specifically, the good tragedy of what he did: to have such disrespect braided into reward of her intelligence, her price, erodes her religion in it. It might be unimaginable to completely recuperate. However she has her finest pal, her wit, her cussed persistence, time. Her life, rendered with such layered complexity that Sorry, Child ought to turn out to be a breakout of this competition.