Sundance 2025 Review: SORRY, BABY, Trauma Recovery Drama Elevated by Eva Victor's Writing, Directing, Acting

Nurtured by Pastel, Barry Jenkins’ production company, Eva Victor (Billions) wrote, directed, and stars in Sorry, Baby, one of the most remarkable, quite possibly extraordinary feature-film debuts in recent festival history.

 

To turn her screenplay into reality, Victor spent the better part of a year mentored by Jenkins through his company, learning the ins-and-outs of filmmaking, from look-books to shot lists (and back again), shooting and editing test footage, and shadowing filmmaker/friend Jane Schoenbrun as the latter directed last year’s Sundance hit, I Saw the TV Glow.

 

Whatever lessons Victor learned through Jenkins’ dedicated mentorship and shadowing Schoenbrun, they were put to excellent use in Sorry, Baby, a non-chronological exploration of a singular woman’s years-long recovery from a life-upending trauma. Victor plays Agnes, a PhD student-turned-college-professor in English Literature at a small, unnamed university in New England, yet Agnes, for all of her presumed brilliance and way with words can only refer to the incident as a “bad thing.”

 

Simplifying the incident functions as both a soothing balm and a coping or avoidance strategy. To actively name the trauma Agnes experiences would be to give it power, the power to dictate, shape, and redefine Agnes’s life, none of it positively.

 

Opening closer to the end than the beginning of Agnes’s onscreen story, it’s evident in the first chapter (of five total), “The Year of the Baby,” that Agnes, for all of the emotional strides she’s made in the intervening months and years since the incident, hasn’t fully healed. The return of Agnes’ best friend and onetime grad student, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), to the house and home they shared as roommates, has an almost similar effect to Agnes’ refusal to give her trauma a more specific name: it helps Agnes to partially sidestep her trauma, but Lydie’s return also brings back a whole host of memories, good, bad, and sometimes unpleasant.

 

Sorry, Baby eventually circles back to Agnes’s foundational trauma, an abject betrayal of trust, an exploitation of the power dynamics between Agnes and a mentor, and the immediate aftermath. Rather than show the audience what, in fact, happened, Victor holds back, locking down the camera across the street as the incident unfolds behind a closed door, the light changes, and time passes. Agnes eventually emerges, stumbling, half-aware of her surroundings, back to her car, and drives back home in a daze. Lydie is anxiously awaiting her at the door, immediately offering her full and total support.

 

Victor mines a dark strain of humor from the aftermath, as an unsympathetic male physician robotically asks Agnes questions. Agnes has an awkward exchange with a prosecutor at a pre-trial jury hearing, as well as an unexpectedly empathetic turn from a virtual stranger, Pete (John Carroll Lynch), who offers a clarifying insight or two and even better, a solidly made sandwich to help ease Agnes’ anxieties. Victor also leverages humor from Agnes’ oddball encounters with a neighbor, Gavin (Lucas Hedges), whose presence signals a different, far less toxic form of masculinity.

 

Throughout, Sorry, Baby hints here and there at how past trauma can impact, influence, or even warp everyday life. The past never really remains in the past.

 

Trauma remains ever-present, like a ghost or spirit that refuses to leave. Clothes or boots worn serve as physical manifestations of the trauma. She is hyper-vigilant about real or imagined dangers. She experiences random, unprovoked  reminders of the trauma itself, sending her confidence reeling. She must deal with the unrelenting despair that often follows.

 

Part of Agnes wants to erase the trauma from her memory, but knows she can’t. It would, in turn, betray the younger self that initially suffered the trauma.

 

From the first destabilizing scene to the last heartbreaking one, Victor also recognizes how, no matter how helpful or supportive our friends and family can be in the immediate aftermath, they eventually move on with their lives and expect survivors to do the same, sometimes well before they’re ready to reconcile themselves to the trauma or its aftermath.

 

In Victor’s sympathetic view, however, judgment doesn’t fall on Agnes’ friends, specifically Lydie, or her former classmates, just an acknowledgement of human nature to compartmentalize ourselves from the pain and anguish of others.