COMIC DRAMA; 1hr 44min
STARRING: Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, Louis Cancelmi
So sorry: Victor and baby
Hermitic college literature professor Agnes (Victor, in a phenomenal film-directing debut) is a sexual-assault victim who is struggling to process the enormity of the experience. The actual assault, by her charismatic thesis advisor (Cancelmi as Preston Decker), isn’t shown, with Victor opting for a long, static, unsettling shot of the house in which the abuse took place.
In the immediate aftermath, Agnes is stunned and shut down. Decker has, meanwhile, fled the coop, resigning from the college the following day to escape retribution. No such luck for his barely acknowledged victim, who three years later is mummified in suffering. Visiting Agnes in her isolated New England home, her college bestie, Lydie (Ackie), who consoled her at the time of the assault, is still concerned for her.
Like a mystery gift, the screenplay unwraps itself over those years, through which Agnes moves with the deliberation of the damaged and in which some positive things do happen. Agnes adopts a stray kitten. She is appointed to a full-time teaching position at her alma mater (complete with, of all things, Decker’s former office); she begins a cosy-sexy relationship with her quirky neighbour, Gavin (Hedges). Yet the harm done is a monkey on her back and the only way to shake the damned thing off is to summon the strength to stare down the past.
If that monkey sounds like a heavy load, it unavoidably is, even when shouldered with such calibrated and critically acclaimed restraint. But Victor also knows their way around glimmers of the absurdist sense of humour that is a survivor’s superpower. Step by punishing step, Agnes comes to terms with her trauma by refusing to allow it to wear her down. “Sometimes,” she confides in the end to Lydie’s baby, with the hard-won wisdom of radical acceptance, “bad stuff just happens.”
