The writer and actress Eva Victor (from TV’s Billions) makes her directorial debut with this warm, witty and unflinching portrait of a life upended by sexual assault. Victor takes starring duties too as an earnest academic called Agnes who works at a top-tier New England university and lives in a secluded house in a nearby woods. The building, like a modest version of the Bates homestead in Psycho, is initially captured in ominous, shadow-filled, horror movie frames.

It’s an effective opening gesture from Victor, hinting at the dread that dwells in Agnes, even as she giggles and spars with newly arrived bestie Lydie (a classy Naomi Ackie). The pair joke about sex and boys and their heady school days, and they read books and fall asleep in front of 12 Angry Men. The tone is very Fleabag with a dash of Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha.

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Soon, however, the film flashes back four years with the sinister title heading “The Year with the Very Bad Thing” and we meet Agnes and Lydie as guileless undergraduates and hardworking students of attentive yet slyly conceited Professor Decker (Louis Cancelmi). He is clearly focused on Agnes. Victor invests every early exchange between them with a sickening awareness of his insidious intentions and what’s to come.

The assault scene is carefully done yet devastating (a long shot, a closed door, horrific implications behind it) and the drama that follows addresses existential issues about what Decker’s abuse has done to Agnes’s sense of self. One of Decker’s greatest crimes, Agnes later decides, is that he denied her the right to see herself as “a person who lives and breathes and thinks for herself”. All this and, incredibly, jokes too. They’re not side-splitters, of course. But funny enough and, like the rest of the film, perfectly judged.
★★★★☆
15, 103min
In cinemas

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