Recovery modes: "Sorry, Baby"

Sorry, Baby is the first A24 release of the summer to enter into serious conversation with the indies of a past era. On some level, Eva Victor's film operates as both an expansion and evolution of the mumblecore form: it starts out shuffling and goofy, prone to erratic rhythms and awkward pauses. (At some early juncture, you may well fear the worst.) Yet this comedy-drama proceeds to set itself a challenge, which it goes on to meet with abundant wit and compassion; it's only towards the end that you realise what an impressive achievement it is. The film starts with a reunion between two old college pals at an isolated house in the countryside. Both nurse something inside them. For Lydie (Naomi Ackie), the guest for the weekend, it's a baby, a sign she has - despite the childish giggles we see her reverting to over the course of this visit - moved on from her student days. For her host and former roomie Agnes (Victor herself), it's a secret pertaining to that same period. Of these two lifepaths, pregnancy and motherhood are the easier to come to terms with: there are appointments and supplements, established protocols. Agnes's situation - what she refers to glancingly as her "bad thing" - is less familiar, which explains why it keeps coming back to haunt her, and may even explain why she's moved out into the middle of nowhere, either to contain this secret, its ramifications and repercussions, or to try and remove herself from the company of others. Gradually, the movie assumes the form of its own characters. Sorry, Baby first presents as light and daffy, but there's something buried down in the guts of the film that keeps resurfacing at unexpected, often inopportune moments. After twenty or so minutes of indifferent shrugging, a flashback makes clear what went on in college, at which point the film confronts a major problem: how, we wonder, do you get through that? How does anybody get past this?

Yet they do, Sorry, Baby insists for the rest of its duration, and there are ways. Time helps: Victor structures the film as five separate episodes, each running roughly twenty minutes, each illustrative of a particular year in these characters' lives. It helps the writer-director-star because it allows the character of Agnes to mature before our eyes, from discombobulated graduate into a better balanced young woman. (The movie matures alongside her, becoming more lived-in and better rounded with every passing encounter.) Friendship helps, too: pushing beyond their cartoonish shared idiom, Victor and Ackie suggest a longstanding bond of mutual appreciation and support. There are other, better men out there, even if Lucas Hedges, quietly smashing as Agnes's closest neighbour, sometimes seems just as maladroit as our heroine. (Also helpful: cute kittens, good sandwiches.) If all else fails, you can always make art out of your experience - though Victor's going for a very unusual tone here, funny without ever downplaying the potentially crushing impact of what's happened. (An exam-room scene encourages us to chuckle at material we wouldn't in other circumstances; it seems crucial that the book Agnes assigns in the first year of her teaching gig is Nabokov's Lolita, a comparable high-wire act.) What's truly impressive is not just that this filmmaker sustains it, it's that in doing so Victor exposes the girlboss approach to sexual impropriety adopted by such post-#MeToo responses as Bombshell and She Said as in many ways unrepresentative. Bad things equally befall women who don't possess a power suit, and haven't got it together; the linear march to justice, vengeance and/or vindication proposed in the majority of screenplays written on this subject is less common than some haphazard muddling through. Everybody's taken an unconventional route to get here - and doubtless there are creatives involved who wish they'd never had to tread this path in the first place - but Sorry, Baby reclaims one of the most useful functions of the indies of yore: critiquing and correcting the flaws and biases of more mainstream endeavours. The film isn't just healthy; it's healing.

Sorry, Baby is now playing in selected cinemas.