Sorry, baby.
We pause in front of a typical New England home. It is painted a muted grey, the kind of grey that takes over the sky just before rain. Steps lead from the front porch to the pavement below. A modest tree leans beside the house. The camera is fixed.
Passersby stroll across the frame—couples, dog walkers, friends. The house remains, its internal happenings unknown.
Day fades to twilight; twilight falls to night. Lights flicker on. Still, the camera does not move.
Suddenly, the door opens, shattering the silence. A girl, her hair dishevelled, hurriedly slips on her shoes without tying her shoelaces. She rushes down the steps, out towards the open. A man stands behind her, watching. He closes the door.
The girl is Agnes. The man is her attacker.
We never see what happens inside the house.
Sorry, Baby, written and directed by Eva Victor, follows Agnes, an academic, through the aftermath of a traumatic sexual assault—an event she repeatedly refers to simply as her “bad thing.” We encounter Agnes at different moments in her life: as a PhD student beginning her thesis, in the immediate aftermath of the assault, and in the years that follow.
The film does not unfold chronologically. Instead, we move backwards and forwards through Agnes’s life, seeing how the “bad thing” sits alongside everything that comes after it. Her career progresses. Friendships evolve. People move away. Life changes. And yet, in some ways, she remains tethered to a moment that everyone else has moved past.
There is something remarkably honest about this.
Perhaps that is also what makes the image of the house so powerful. As something life-altering happens inside, the world outside continues exactly as it did before. People walk their dogs. Couples pass by. Day turns into night. Nobody knows.
So much of what people experience happens this way—quietly and invisibly, while the rest of the world continues to move.
Victor chooses not to make the assault itself the centre of the film. Instead, she turns our attention to everything that surrounds it: the institutional responses that can feel inadequate, the difficulty of returning to ordinary life, the strange ways in which trauma can resurface, and the people who make continuing a little easier.
Central to this is Agnes’s friendship with Lydie. Lydie cannot change what happened to Agnes. She cannot make her heal. What she can do is believe her, listen to her and remain beside her.
On August 10, 2025, the Rani Fund, alongside Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co., hosted a special screening of Sorry, Baby at PVR INOX, in collaboration with CREA and Sakshi.
The screening was followed by a conversation around assault, particularly within environments such as university campuses, where vulnerability can intersect with deeply unequal power dynamics.
It gave us an opportunity not only to discuss the film, but to consider the questions it leaves behind: how we respond when someone tells us something has happened to them; what meaningful support can look like; and how we create spaces in which difficult experiences can be spoken about without judgement.
A film cannot answer these questions for us. But it can sometimes make them easier to ask.