In a sentenceBad thing, bath, kitten, sandwich from a stranger: the film knows how little it takes to keep a person going
Agnes (Eva Victor) teaches literature at the small New England college where she did her graduate degree, and has never left the town or the wooden house she once shared with her best friend. Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who did leave, comes back from New York for a weekend and finds Agnes much as she was, only more so. The film then goes back several years to their last term as students, when Agnes is the star of the seminar, Natasha (Kelly McCormack) resents it, and their advisor Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi) asks Agnes to his house to discuss her thesis. What happens there is the thing the rest of the film lives with, along with a neighbour, Gavin (Lucas Hedges), a stray cat, and a sandwich shop run by Pete (John Carroll Lynch).
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Eva Victor’s first film, which she wrote and leads, is about the years after a sexual assault at a small college, and it is dry, patient and often funny. It goes slack in the middle, and Naomi Ackie holds it up whenever it does.
Eva Victor’s first film opens with a visit. Agnes (Eva Victor) still lives in the small New England college town where she did her graduate degree, and now teaches in the department that taught her. Lydie (Naomi Ackie) comes back from New York for a weekend and the two fall into the private language of people who have shared a bathroom. Then the film goes back to their last year as students, and to the afternoon Agnes went to her advisor’s house to talk about her thesis. Victor, who also wrote it, has made a film about a sexual assault that spends almost no time on the assault, and she holds to that.
It comes in chapters, one a year, each with a title card, and they are out of order. Alex O’Flinn and Randi Atkins cut between them without a dissolve or a date, so the years after look like the years before. Caity Birmingham’s production design keeps the same books and mugs on the same shelves throughout, and Emily Costantino dresses Agnes in the same oversized jumpers whether she is a student or a lecturer. Only the people change.
The scene that decides the film is the house. Mia Cioffi Henry puts the camera across the road from the home of Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi) and leaves it there. Agnes walks in with the sun still up, and the shot holds while the afternoon goes, a lamp comes on inside and the windows turn from white to yellow to black. Then she comes out, gets into her car, and the camera goes with her in one take as she drives home. Nothing is shown, and we sat through it counting the light like someone waiting outside a hospital.
Then the bath. Lydie sits on the floor and Agnes, in the water, tells her what happened, in order, going back to correct a detail, laughing once at something that is not funny. It moved us more than we were ready for, because Victor plays it as reportage: Agnes is trying to get the facts right, as if that will help. Ackie’s face does the rest, and she has the harder job throughout. Lydie is loud, quick and warm, and must be the well person by consensus without turning into the film’s conscience, which she manages by being funny at Agnes rather than about her.
Victor is good on the people who are no use. A doctor examines Agnes with the manner of a man checking a boiler. Two women from the college explain, kindly, that Decker has already left, that there is a process, and that the process cannot now be started. Nobody is a villain; everyone says the correct thing in the correct order and none of it does anything. We laughed in the doctor’s office and were not sure we were meant to.
Not all of it holds. Kelly McCormack’s Natasha, the jealous classmate, is drawn broad enough to belong in a different film, and Lucas Hedges’s Gavin, the neighbour Agnes takes to bed, is a decent man written as a placeholder. The two middle chapters slacken, and there are stretches where Cioffi Henry’s stillness starts to look like a director unwilling to move the camera. Lia Ouyang Rusli’s score is used sparingly, which is right, but when it arrives it tends to tell us what to feel a beat before the scene has got there.
The best thing in it is five minutes of John Carroll Lynch. Pete runs a sandwich shop, finds Agnes in her car unable to breathe, and sits with her on the kerb. He asks her nothing, gives her a sandwich, and she eats it. Victor names a whole chapter after this and she is right to; it is the most useful account of what helps that we have seen in a film on this subject.
Most films about this build to a confrontation, a courtroom or a speech. This one is not interested, and we will not say what it does instead beyond noting that Victor, with Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski producing, has the nerve to keep the last chapter small. It is a 15 and runs 103 minutes. Watch it with the friend you would have rung from the bath.
Most critics take to Eva Victor’s debut, and the praise gathers in one place: the way it sets dry humour beside a sexual assault and its aftermath without letting either undo the other. Victor’s performance as Agnes, deadpan and closely observed, comes up in nearly every review, as does writing that lets her be a whole person rather than a case study. The friendship with Lydie, played by Naomi Ackie, is singled out again and again as the film’s emotional centre, and several reviews admire the non-chronological structure for making the recovery feel lived rather than plotted.
The reservations are mild and few. The Hollywood Reporter finds it occasionally too easygoing and visually cautious; The Skinny thinks it never quite realises its potential. The one clear dissent is Vulture, which finds the film evasive where it means to be insightful, though even there Ackie’s performance is praised. The spread is narrow, with twenty-one positive verdicts against a single negative one.
The review calls Eva Victor’s debut breathtaking and says she has nothing to be sorry for. It singles out the film’s emotional insight and warmth.
Read the full review →Petter warmly praises the film as an exceptionally truthful depiction of sexual trauma and healing. She singles out the supportive friendship between Agnes and Lydie as central to its emotional power.
Read the full review →The critic calls the film a darkly funny, tender, and major debut. She especially praises Victor’s finely tuned performance and the film’s empathetic balance of humor with painful subject matter.
Read the full review →Walsh finds Victor’s debut a sensitive, nuanced triumph that lingers. She particularly praises Victor’s detailed honesty in portraying trauma and female friendship.
Read the full review →McIndoe finds the film sharply funny without diminishing the devastation of Agnes’s experience. He praises the performances and subtle writing for conveying her dissociation, while highlighting the absurd, unresponsive bureaucracy she faces.
Read the full review →The review calls the film a fresh, thoughtful and tenderly funny reinvention of the trauma plot. It praises Victor’s deft balance of light and dark, especially the perceptive scene where Agnes discusses trauma over a sandwich.
Read the full review →
I May Destroy YouMichaela Coel’s series on the same subject, faster, angrier and just as funny.
Frances HaTwo women who share a language, and what happens when one of them leaves.
Never Rarely Sometimes AlwaysA quiet American film that trusts a held face over a speech.
The SouvenirJoanna Hogg’s student years, remembered at the same careful distance.
Certain WomenSmall-town lives, low light, and nobody saying quite what they mean.
