Sorry, Baby

"Something terrible happened to Agnes.” This is the first sentence of the official blurb for director Eva Victor’s 2025 debut film, Sorry, Baby. As the movie’s plot unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that the “terrible” thing Agnes experienced was an instance of sexual assault at the hands of her PhD advisor during her time as an English graduate student. Sorry, Baby stood out to me because of its thoughtful, empathetic handling of sexual assault and refusal to minimize survivors to the sum of their painful experiences.

I saw Sorry, Baby for the first time this past December and, upon my first viewing, I immediately knew it was a special movie, specifically due to its nuanced and careful portrayal of sexual violence. The movie is a relative singularity in modern American media in the sense that it discusses rape without ever showing the act on screen, avoiding the all-too common pitfall of dehumanizing survivors by reducing them to the violence they endured. I am a Sexual Assault Peer Educator (SAPE) here on Georgetown’s campus, and unfortunately problematic on-screen representations of sexual assault that graphically depict rape are enough of a problem that my coworkers and I discuss them in our lesson plans as one of the major ways in which we normalize and perpetuate sexual violence in America today.

Photo Credits: Mia Cioffi Henry/Sundance Institute/A24

Typically, when movies and television shows feature sexual assault, they do so in a way that desensitizes the audience to the act. Take for example, Game of Thrones, which features numerous gratuitous rape scenes to the extent that frequent, graphic representations of sexual violence have come to be accepted as nothing more than a neutral characteristic of the show. Alternatively, consider the beloved teen drama Gossip Girl, in which one of the protagonists repeatedly harasses, degrades, and even attempts to assault multiple of the female leads only for him to be redeemed by the final season. The end result of portrayals like these is the implication that sexual assault is ultimately inconsequential, and more akin to a shocking plot device to be forgotten by the next episode than the devastating, life-altering travesty it often functions as in real life.

On the other hand, Sorry, Baby manages to demonstrate that Agnes was assaulted without ever explicitly stating such or depicting the act itself. The choice to never show Agnes’s rape on camera unfortunately represents a relative novelty in media, and it is for this reason precisely that I believe Sorry, Baby deserves widespread acclaim and attention.

Explicit depictions of sexual assault, such as those featured in Game of Thrones and Gossip Girl, also have the potential to adversely affect survivors of sexual assault. This is because the sensationalized version of sexual violence we see on screen rarely captures the reality of the experience and frequently disregards the personhood of survivors. In an interview with my boss, Alex Huss, a sexual assault response counselor and licensed clinical social worker at Georgetown SAPE, she explained that many on-screen portrayals of sexual assault can cause survivors to doubt their own experiences due to an overwhelming emphasis on excessive, at times theatrical violence. Specifically, she stated “almost every survivor who’s come to me has been like, ‘Well, it wasn’t that bad ...’ or ‘What I went through doesn’t count because it would have been worse if I had been sent to the hospital ... or if I had felt scared in a specific way [that they tend to show on screen].’” For this reason, the choice to leave Agnes’s rape unseen in Sorry, Baby is an important one; it takes away the emphasis from the violence done unto her and avoids any implications surrounding what assault “should” look like, instead turning the focus entirely onto Agnes and her individual response.

The impact of this is twofold. In focusing solely on her experience of the assault, Sorry, Baby allows Agnes to define her own narrative, as opposed to her attacker or her traumatic experience —an approach essentially unseen in media portrayals of sexual violence. It additionally presents the viewer with a hyper-realistic, survivor-centric account of sexual assault that often gets lost in more explicit or graphic depictions.

Namely, because Agnes’s story does not linger on the shocking, graphic violence of her experience, the viewer gets to witness sexual assault for what it unfortunately tends to be in the majority of cases: complicated and intertwined with the demands of daily life. Following Agnes’s assault, she not only has to return to work at her PhD program where her attacker was essentially her boss, but she must spend hours filing paperwork and attending meetings in order to pursue accountability for her rapist. She also must attend jury duty, where the memory of her assault is triggered as she is forced to disclose whether she has been the victim of a crime in front of a crowd. In moving on with her academic pursuits as well as her day-to-day tasks, Agnes is also shown grappling with feelings of intellectual admiration for the same man who assaulted her, as well as sympathy for his young child. These lingering positive feelings Agnes feels towards her attacker are experiences other media depictions of sexual assault rarely–if ever–shed light on. Including these complex feelings allows Agnes’s character and personhood to extend beyond her traumatic experience and all the negative feelings associated with it, while also disrupting the pervasive, victim-blaming narrative that when survivors carry positive (or even just not entirely negative) sentiments for their attacker it invalidates their assault.

In devoting all of its attention to Agnes, and none of it to the actual moment in which she is assaulted, Sorry, Baby recognizes survivors as complex figures, as well as active agents with lives that grow beyond the crimes committed against them. In other words, because we do not see it on screen, Agnes is never reduced to her assault. This choice forces audiences to reckon with the often untold truth of sexual violence. It is rarely the shocking brutalization of Game of Thrones, or as Huss put it, the “stranger in the alley” depiction we so frequently associate with rape. Instead, as we learn through Agnes’s story, assault is not a distant rarity or a dramatic movie plot, but rather the experience of regular, everyday people. In the words of Huss, assault is statistically most likely to be the doing of “someone you already know, someone you’ve already dated, someone you’ve been friends with,” and the full extent of its impact cannot be contained within the confines of one moments-long scene as we unfortunately see all-too-often in media.

For this reason, the significance of Sorry, Baby and its conscientious, survivor-focused approach to sexual assault cannot be overstated. As Huss explained to me, “the more we share stories about victims, survivors, the better off we’ll all be acknowledging their personhood and experience. It takes two seconds to hurt someone, but it takes months, years, lifetimes to undo the harm.” By refusing to diminish Agnes’s story to a short, brutalizing moment in the form of a rape scene and instead showing us the way in which her life and personhood continue to extend past the “terrible” thing she has experienced, Sorry, Baby teaches us just that. Ultimately, Sorry, Baby represents a momentous, yet relatively novel approach to depicting survivors in film and I only hope that future projects will follow suit.

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Kate Heslin is a sophomore in the School of Health majoring in Global Health and minoring in French and Creative Writing. She is a Sexual Assault Peer Educator at Georgetown.