Sorry, Baby the powerful new film written, directed and starring Eva Victor, seems to me not so much a lesson that therapists and counsellors have to learn about the fundamental need to treat those who’ve experienced trauma, at whatever stage of their lives, with expert care and therapeutic love, but rather as a keen reminder to hone our compassionate skills and stay alert to the power of trauma to remain like a dormant volcano not just for weeks and months but long years too.

The central event in Sorry, Baby, a sexual assault on a student by a teacher, comes only after we have learnt to regard the characters as real people with real lives and we care that they are at risk of being damaged.

We are invited to admire, delight in and maybe even envy, the strong and abiding friendship of the beautifully played central characters Agnes (Eva Victor) and Lydie (Naomi Ackie). Their friendship is at the heart of the non-linear journey of healing Sorry, Baby takes us on.

Eva Victor comes to film via a career on the US comedy scene in which they have previously said they learnt to ‘punch up’ and ‘not down’ when it comes to the target of a laugh. In Sorry, Baby, their cinematic debut, they land their punches. The targets are primarily the self-serving, legally-anxious world of academia, and a similarly uncaring medical profession.

The potentially predatory nature of teachers and professors when faced with students’ vulnerability through naivety or a desire to impress intellectually is not a new subject, but Eva Victor brings to it a freshness and personal insight. Agnes, like Eva Victor, is non-binary but in Agnes’s case her gender identity seems quite unformed, lending an additional layer of defencelessness which makes the professor’s transgressive violence even less forgivable. We see no violence but in cinematically striking ways we are taken quickly to a feeling of uneasiness and then worse.

The tragedy at the heart of the film is that Agnes is not given the care she needs by those in authority. Instead, she learns to carry on and find a way out of suicidal ideation primarily through her friendship with Lydie. She is also supported by a neighbour, Gavin (finely wrought by Lucas Hedges) who plays an aspect of true friendship, kindness, rather than a fully-formed character.

What Eva Victor portrays with real brilliance is the ‘choppy’ (their word) nature of healing from trauma and how stuck in trauma’s grip those who’ve experienced it can be. The world around Agnes carries on, people thrive, new relationships are formed, but she seems frozen in time. Good things happen to Agnes but she is frequently ambushed by her feelings of social isolation and outrage.

Eva Victor weaves all the emotional ambush scenes finely through the material of the film. However, the thread that was most compellingly played out for me was through Agnes’s boots. As she enters the professor’s house to discuss her thesis he asks her to remove her boots. As she leaves she does not wait to put them on, but carries them to her car. When she arrives home it is her friend and college mate, Lydie, who notices the boots are on the wrong feet. In this small, but powerful way we understand what we feared was true. Everything has changed. What was comfortable and serviceable has been perverted.

The boots get stashed away in a cupboard where Agnes hopes the confusion, sadness and anger they carry will get hidden away. However, it’s not that easy and the boots tumble out at another moment of high drama later in the film. We see Agnes learning it’s just not that easy to compartmentalise trauma. The film is expert at depicting the ‘stickiness’ of trauma, a great sadness that therapists know so well.

Sorry, Baby is a very moving and aesthetically arresting film which progresses with great humour and humanity. The healing nature of kindness is not just depicted by Lucas Hedges’ character but is also at the heart of the section of the film entitled The Year with the Good Sandwich. As a viewer I found I valued these episodes as much as Agnes. In what could have been an unrelentingly grim tale, Eva Victor generously allows us hope and access to potentially redemptive behaviours.

The film’s final scenes feel a bit of a scramble to fit in all that Victor wishes to convey symbolically; the need to nurture the child (baby) within, to speak out about transgressions and hurts we may suffer, to value literature, friendship, diversity and the circle of life. It all feels a bit much. Despite this, their overall message (with a firm reference to the Virginia Woolf fan girl leitmotif which runs throughout Sorry, Baby) is pretty clear – safe harbour via the light of friendship is precious and to be prized.