Upon seeing the poster for Sorry, Baby—a shot of the film's protagonist, Agnes, looking into the eyes of a tiny gray kitten—my partner immediately dropped their ironclad no-spoilers protocol and began frantically texting a source who had seen it premiere at Sundance.

Did “Sorry, Baby” apply to the kitten (clearly a baby)? Was misfortune due to befall the kitten?

We live in exhausting times. It does not give away much to tell you that (SPOILER ALERT) the kitten is fine. It is Agnes (Eva Victor, also the film's writer and director) who is not. As Sorry, Baby’s tagline puts it “Something bad happened to Agnes.” Not the kitten.

Initially, things appear to be going great for Agnes. She lives in a cute little white house in a cute little East Coast college town that looks like something out of an L.L. Bean ad. Agnes has a substantial collection of voluminous, expensive-looking sweaters. Despite being a freshly-minted English PhD, she has pulled off the nearly impossible feat of getting hired as a full professor. As one colleague puts it, Agnes is a “lucky bitch.”

And yet, something is very off about Agnes. When Lydie (Naomi Ackie), a friend from college, visits from New York, the cottage is lit with buttery, rom-com glow. When Lydie leaves, everything goes cold. There’s a low ominous tone, like a public alert system for hauntings in progress.

Eva Victor, the writer-director of Sorry Baby, is an actor and former writer for Reductress (they anonymously authored such bangers as “I Never Thought I Would Find Love. And Then I Didn’t” and “My Period Flowed So Hard Everyone Grabbed Surf Boards and Is Having Fun”). In 2018, they found viral internet fame posting short videos on Twitter, among them: “the girl from the movie who doesn't believe in love..” and “me when i def did not murder my husband.”

Not long after, Victor realized that one of her followers was Academy Award-winning film director Barry Jenkins. An exchange of DMs followed. A lot of the shorts you’re making already have the structure of movies, Jenkins wrote to Victor. If you ever want to make a feature film, let’s talk.

Jenkins’ production company, Pastel, consistently puts out ambitious work led by women who have never directed a feature-length film before—Charlotte Wells (Aftersun) Rachel Morrison (The Fire Inside) Raven Jackson (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt) being three examples. Victor deviates from this in that they identify as nonbinary (at a press screening, Victor noted that the number of people who fail to notice that Agnes is as well “is astounding and should be studied.” [In the movie, Agnes is nonbinary and uses she/her pronouns. -eds]

In the early days of the COVID pandemic shutdown, Victor began writing a screenplay. But what emerged on the page was not manic inventiveness, like on social media, but a slow, close reworking of a period in Victor’s life that they—like Agnes—refer to as “the Bad Thing.” Victor rigorously watched movies they admired, like Kelly Reichart’s Certain Women and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blue, studying how those works were put together. They began working with an acting coach on how to play Agnes as a character, and shadowed director Jane Schoenbrun on the set of I Saw the TV Glow.

How much you, as a moviegoer, will dig the result of this homework very much depends on your enjoyment of auteur films—the kind where you’re riding shotgun to another person’s consciousness for 103 minutes. Sorry, Baby is the kind of movie that you can nerd out over for days, over the setting and the acting and the sound design.

That enjoyment will also depend a great deal on whether you’ve personally experienced trauma and its aftermath—a reality-distortion field that Patricia Lockwood once described as: “you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn’t there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth.”

Those who have experienced a Bad Thing—whether or not it is Agnes’ specific Bad Thing—will probably love the gentle way Sorry, Baby tackles suffering, how it pulls you out of time and into a hell loop of your own consciousness. Victor has made an appealingly quaint best case scenario of hard times and dark thoughts—like a rom-com, but for sadness.

If you watched Blue and thought, man, how awful for our French protagonist that her beloved husband and daughter died, but that affogato sure looks good, you know of what I speak. The crowd that I watched Sorry, Baby with was completely flowing with this cinematic vibe. When the kitten finally made its cinematic debut, the entire darkened theater reverberated with awwwwwwwws.

Sorry, Baby opens at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st starting on Thurs July 10, showtimes and ticket info at cinema21.com, 103 minutes, rated R.