Dealing with the aftermath of deep personal trauma on screen requires an immense amount of care, and Sorry, Baby handles it with a profound, unblinking delicacy. Writer-director-star Eva Victor achieves a brilliant tightrope balance, delivering a movie that is devastatingly raw yet sharp, witty, and entirely human.
Distributed by A24 and having picked up the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance, this debut feature flips the script on traditional trauma narratives. It rejects explosive, sensational drama to focus instead on the messy, quiet stagnation of recovery.
The Plot: Moving On When You're Stuck in the Past
The film revolves around Agnes (Eva Victor), a sharp, ambitious literature academic in a secluded, off-season New England college town. Her life is divided by a sharp axis: before and after "the bad thing"—a sexual assault by her university professor.
Three years later, Agnes has technically progressed; she is now a professor herself, even occupying the very office once held by her abuser. Yet internally, she is caught in a paralyzing loop of survival. When her fiercely supportive best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) comes to stay, the physical presence of someone who knows her history cracks open Agnes's carefully constructed coping mechanisms. As she navigates an incredibly awkward, sweet courtship with a blissfully unaware love interest named Gavin (Lucas Hedges) and pushes back against a hyper-competitive academic rival (Kelly McCormack), Agnes is forced to confront the haunting, omnipresent weight of an event she can still barely bring herself to name.
Aesthetics and Tone: The Power of What is Left Unsaid
What makes Sorry, Baby such a monumental achievement is Victor's radical directorial restraint. Cinema often relies on explicitly showing violence to shock the viewer, but Victor intentionally keeps the assault off-camera, utilizing extreme distance and static, lingering frames to capture Agnes entering and leaving the professor’s home. By denying the perpetrator narrative space, the film grants absolute, protective focus to Agnes’s internal processing.
The film relies on a non-linear, episodic structure that perfectly mimics the erratic nature of PTSD. It beautifully offsets its heavy subject matter with a razor-sharp, gallows sense of humor. Agnes’s cynical, dry asides never feel like cheap gags; they are the personal armor she uses to steel herself against a woefully inadequate university administration and a world that demands she simply "get over it."
Performances: Chemistry Built on Lived Shorthand
Eva Victor carries the film with an extraordinary, multi-layered lead performance. She embodies Agnes with a striking mix of intellectual armor and childlike fragility, making her emotional numbness feel viscerally tangible.
The ensemble cast provides exceptional texture:
Naomi Ackie gives the film its emotional spine as Lydie. The scenes shared between Ackie and Victor—particularly a raw, tender sequence where Agnes recounts the details of the assault while soaking in a bathtub—radiate an authentic, protective sisterhood.
Lucas Hedges brings an endearing, soft-spoken awkwardness as Gavin, offering the audience a warm, innocent reprieve from the film’s heavy introspection.
Kelly McCormack is brilliantly grating as the insecure, passive-aggressive colleague who weaponizes professional jealousy.
The Verdict: A Coming-of-Age for the Broken
Sorry, Baby is a brilliant, tragicomic triumph that honors the messy, nonlinear reality of healing. It is a film about the painful loss of the self, but also a quiet reminder of the profound grace found in being seen by the people who love you. For an independent debut, it shows a dazzling amount of structural intelligence and emotional bravery.
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌗 (4.5 / 5)
