Agnes (Eva Victor) is a high achiever. Barely out of her twenties, she is already a faculty member of the English department at a north-eastern US college. The red brick college sits with certainty in the landscape; so should Agnes, but something is off. The cottage where she lives – narrow and tall, just like she is – feels isolated. At night she hears the wind in the trees and checks the door, waiting for something. A reckoning never materialises.

Sorry, Baby, which is also written and directed by Victor, toggles backward and forward in time from the Agnes who is outwardly established, yet nervy, to a slightly younger Agnes who is radiant with promise. We learn that what has dimmed her is rape, though the word is hardly used, and ‘what happened’ is not really the film’s narrative concern so much as how it feels to live with what has happened, which Agnes calls ‘the bad thing’. The after-effects of the assault by her thesis supervisor (the culprit is flagged early) extend to the oddly underpopulated town and the muted colour scheme of browns and whites, which suggest that Agnes now perceives the world at a lonely distance. Supporting her is her friend and sometimes housemate, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), and her nearest neighbour, Gavin (Lucas Hedges), with whom she maintains a casual, low-stakes relationship.

Agnes is sad, that is for certain, but she is also drily funny and habitually self-deprecating. Her character might be something like Victor, who has a background in comic acting and online writing, including scripted videos for platforms like TikTok. (Rolling Stone recently described Victor as a ‘niche internet presence’, which is a perfectly twenty-first-century job description.) Victor’s ear for social comedy is apparent in two scenes that take place in the immediate aftermath of Agnes’s rape: one at the local hospital with a tactless doctor, and the other at the college’s administrative offices. Here, Agnes learns that her supervisor (Louis Cancelmi) has resigned mere hours before her report of his assault. This makes him, stress the college representatives, a former employee – and no concern of theirs. ‘We know what you’re going through.’ They nod, stupidly.

The strength of Sorry, Baby is its unpredictability. The film is amusing in places where other directors might have chosen seriousness, and then suddenly full of dread, its veering tone mimicking Agnes’s interior state. It is also nuanced in its portrayal of relations between graduate students and their teachers. The younger Agnes is pleased to be her supervisor Preston’s ‘chosen one’, his star student and mentee. He is charming, in his forties, with novels to his name: very much the cool guy of the English department. She considers sleeping with him, but decides against it, and this self-defined ‘no’ – what she did not want – becomes one of the few things that Agnes can hold on to in the wake of his decision to ignore her refusals and betray her trust. We watch the two of them in his book-lined, wood-panelled office, which will become her office after Preston’s hasty resignation. (This is not the scene of the crime, which happens off-camera, at Preston’s house.) Their conversation is awkward; it seems obvious that he is breaching boundaries – complaining about his ex-wife, for instance – in order to stoke an intimacy he can later exploit. But perhaps only obvious to a viewer because we have already been told how this will end.

Eve Victor as Agnes and Louis Cancelmi as Preston (courtesy of VVS Films)

Victor has spoken about the influence of Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016) on Sorry, Baby, and this is most apparent in the look of the film – its limited, wintry palette and sustained long shots. But the comparison is also telling in terms of what Victor’s film does not do, which is to fill in the world of its characters beyond the horizon of Agnes’s assault. Certain Women, adapted from three short stories by Maile Meloy, is a masterpiece of minor detail: it gives the illusion that its loosely connected small-town characters emerge onscreen before sinking back into their daily lives. The same can’t be said of Sorry, Baby.

At the end of the supervision meeting between Preston and Agnes, as he rushes out the door to collect his young son, he hands her a copy of a recent purchase, a first edition copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). Yet this detail seems implausible: the notion that a college professor could afford a collectible worth at least thirty thousand dollars or the way Agnes so casually handles it, like it is any old book. It is indicative of the weaknesses in Victor’s script, which flags themes – Virginia Woolf was also a victim of sexual assault – but does not follow them down into the grain of life.

If a scholar of literature like Agnes, for instance, has trouble defining the violence that is committed against them, what does that say about the limits of language? What in Agnes’s background has made her so driven, and how might that drive make her hard on herself in the aftermath of something over which she has had no control? What of Lydie, whose own faith in the world appears undamaged, in spite of everything? In the parts of the film that are closest to the present day, Lydie has moved to New York, where her burgeoning lesbian romance and subsequent pregnancy become a counterbalance to Agnes’s distress. But by the end we know as little about Lydie as we did at the start, apart from the fact that she appears to be unflaggingly ebullient.

Lydie’s baby gives the film its title, and Agnes addresses them in a quasi-monologue (babies cannot talk back, after all) on the fact that life is full of unforeseen misfortunes. Agnes promises to stand by the baby as protector, interlocutor, aunty, and friend. What is meant, presumably, to be a poignant speech feels infantile, though to describe it as such may be unfair to the young. Who more than children, commanded by adults, know better that life can be soured by the spiteful – or worse, the indifferent – use of power?

Sorry, Baby (VVS Films) is in cinemas on September 4.