Agnes’ (Eva Victor) life is defined by a sense of stagnancy. Four years after completing grad school in rural New England, she’s living in the same house and going to the same building, only now as a professor. Whatever true joy she seems to experience is infrequent visits from her best friend and former roommate Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who has moved on, starting a family in New York City. As Victor assiduously peels back the layers of her sharp, unnerving, witty feature debut Sorry, Baby, the reason for being stuck in time becomes clear: in her final days of grad school she was raped by her advisor, who quickly deserted the town, leaving no culpability and even less sense of justice or closure.
Navigating the pieces of a shattered life, Victor (who both wrote and directed the film) handles such delicate subject matter with not only piercing, emotional insight but a sense of surprising humor in a miracle of tone and storytelling. The themes her debut explores––how sexual assault affects every subsequent moment of existence, drifting friendships, workplace competitiveness, human-animal relationships––aren’t necessarily novel, but experiencing the precise way she handles each scene with a unique clarity of vision feels like a revelation.
Conveyed in nonlinear but clearly defined chapters, we begin at the end with “The Year with the Baby.” Upon a long-awaited visit to Agnes’ secluded home, Lydie reveals she is pregnant. The reaction is met with a joking-yet-straight-faced narcissism as Agnes asks Lydie if she’ll name the baby after her. Here are two friends whose relationship feels genuine: from sex to suicide, they’ll talk about anything under the sun and always have each other’s back in the most uncomfortable situations. Cinematographer Mia Cioffi Henry shoots in a calm, meticulous fashion where an uneasy sense of framing starts to materialize. An ominous mood builds as Agnes is portrayed as if trapped in isolation, disturbed by noises in the middle of the night. It may hint as such, but the beginnings of a horror film this is not. Instead these are subtle signals that all is not right in her mind and body. We wind back four years to the next chapter, featuring the event that will forever reorient Agnes’ life: “The Year with the Bad Thing.”
To dive too greatly into plot specifics would rob Sorry, Baby of its surprising power. Suffice to say Victor handles the trauma of sexual assault and its soul-devouring aftermath with nuance and lucidity. Rather than show the act, she gives authority to Agnes as she recounts the specifics in sobering, painstaking detail. It’s a startling, chilling scene, in which Victor writes, directs, and acts with an astonishing specificity of feeling and confusion for what just happened. What immediately follows is a wave of humor via a visit to a socially unaware doctor and even less considerate school admin faculty as Agnes starts to realize these systems aren’t really in a place to help victims, rather just tick the required boxes. This astute perceptiveness, coated in black humor with the accepting frustrations that Agnes will have to rely on herself to pick up the pieces, is what makes Sorry, Baby truly exceptional. Witnessing how Victor is able to fully convey the horrors of such a nightmare while still carrying a tender sense of warmth is remarkable.
When minor-but-impactful characters enter her orbit––including the long-awaited return of Lucas Hedges as her kindhearted neighbor and a vigorous John Carrol Lynch in a memorable one-scene cameo––we start to see different sides of our lead. She’s created a character that says exactly what’s on her mind, yet at her core, there’s a captivating unknowability. As the reasoning for the structure begins to cohere, Victor knows there’s no easy resolution. The thesis she’s dedicated the most time in her life toward becomes a forever-tarnished symbol of her worst nightmare. The rooms she enters most become a reminder of the bad thing. A single word brings a flood of uneasiness back. With pitch-perfect nuance in every gesture, Victor gives an astounding performance in conveying this mix of agony and tender yet confrontational empathy for the small world around her.
After shepherding some of the most distinctly directed work from female helmers the last few years with Aftersun, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, and Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski’s PASTEL has another coup with Sorry, Baby. There’s never a second of Victor’s debut that feels like her vision was compromised. While comparisons to the tonal juggling act that can be found in early Greta Gerwig and Phoebe Waller-Bridge are apt on the surface, Victor has crafted a film that feels entirely of her own voice, a breath of fresh air in a sea of American independent cinema that often seems to chase the last breakthrough. A directorial debut of unfiltered frankness in both its tragedy and comedy, Sorry, Baby is a singular feat of storytelling.
Sorry, Baby premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.