Eva Victor on her non-linear debut feature, an achingly human study in the rhythms of grief | Canada Voices

Equal parts tender and sardonic, writer-director Eva Victor’s debut feature, Sorry, Baby, is a welcome and achingly human study in the time and rhythms of grief. Winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the recipient of rave reviews at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Sorry, Baby is a refreshingly grounded testament to the ways in which language and form can offer themselves as acts of care.

A work of fiction inherently shaped by personal experience, Victor stars as Agnes, a former graduate student turned English professor who lives and works in a rural New England town. Divided into five, non-chronological chapters that follow Agnes over the course of five years, the film allows us to be witness to her life before, during and after her experience of what her character comes to refer to as “something bad.”

While in no way ambiguous about the violence Agnes experiences, Agnes and her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), speak of this experience with circuitous, distanced language, welcoming a kind of mutual vulnerability that is given by means of gently sidestepping past the intensity of certain words, certain phrases, certain spaces. It’s a tender act of sharing a common language that allows for things unsaid to be expressly understood, a manner which is, in turn, echoed in Victor’s graceful, darkly comic, and oftentimes quietly devastating visual language.

Sitting with the filmmaker in an unassuming dining room in a downtown Toronto hotel ahead of Sorry, Baby’s July 4th release, Victor shared, “The reason I made this film was to make a film for the person I was — a person who needed a film that felt like it was holding me. I wanted the film to feel like a hug, but also not shy away from hard things.”

Did you always see yourself as the lead and directing?

I knew I wanted to write a story that was about healing and trying to survive after something bad happens; a story about the love and the lifesaving power of a friendship that allows you to survive.

I knew I wanted to act in it and it took me a second to figure out that I wanted to direct it. I wasn’t sure how to do it — I’d never gone to film school — so I sort of thought that was never something I could do. But I realized that I knew what it needed to look and feel like, so it became more about trying to figure out how to translate what was in my mind to words and to another image that would be created by me and more people. It was a bit of a journey deciding, “Yeah, I want to own that I want to do this.”

What was your thinking in terms of the visual language of the film? It’s such a cozy film while at the same time also being so emotionally urgent.

The house was a really important part of it. The film has a total of 84 scenes and 70 of them take place in Agnes’s house. So, it was important to me to find this cottage that could be this kind of cozy, nest-like bubble for Lydie and Agnes. I wanted it to feel warm and like you were surrounded by books at every turn, but it also had to be a place where, when Agnes is alone, it could feel more like a house of horrors and ghosts — getting bluer, darker, and just a little scarier. That all needed to exist in one space, so I spent a lot of time thinking about the house as a subjective experience related to what Agnes was feeling in different moments.

What were your intentions in terms of having a non-linear storyline that grounds your characters largely in “the time after” such an urgent experience versus “the moment during”?

I knew that I wanted to decentre the violence in the story, which took me a second to figure out how to actually do, structurally speaking. It’s part of why I wanted to create the film in chapters and have the first chapter centre on this reunion of two best friends that feels so full of love and laughter. It was a way to set audiences up to feel safe and comfortable before we go back in time in the film and go through harder stuff.

I also wanted the chapters to feel like they move through time in different ways. Some scenes feel like they last a year because, for Agnes, it feels like she can’t escape those moments she’s in. Scenes like those are emblematic of that period of her life — that year in her life — where she was kind of forced out of her cave too soon and made to talk about something she wasn’t ready to speak about.

I wanted to ground the film in Agnes’s own experience of time in her life — one where time moves in this very different, strange way because she’s just trying to put one foot in front of the other, day by day. Her journey in the film is kind of minute, in terms of degrees of healing, but it’s also important and so significant and amazing that she gets there.

Did the process of acting this story out on screen – in a space you were leading as director – offer you a way to reprocess or rework your own personal experience into something different?

To be able to direct myself as an actor — to decide where, when, and how I went and what happened to my body while I was on set — was so meaningful. The joy of acting, for me, and the scariest thing about it, is the euphoria that happens when you feel another actor meeting you with such incredible trust. It allows you to lose control while still feeling safe and joyful.

There’s a version of this film where I didn’t feel like I was making the film I wanted to make — a film that I could imagine being really devastating and just completely horrific. I am so grateful and lucky that everyone understood why it was important for me to make this film in the way I knew it needed to be made. To be heard like that and to be respected about this topic — to be seen as a person with something to say about it — and to be met with an enthusiasm and willingness to see that vision through is very, very meaningful.

This interview was edited and condensed.

Special to The Globe and Mail