Sorry, Baby arrives in cinemas on a high from Sundance Film Festival, where it scooped the Waldo Salt screenwriting award and was acquired by A24, the hottest independent distributor, in a bidding war. A European festival bow at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight followed. If that isn’t enough to confirm Eva Victor’s flawless debut as the year’s coolest title, Barry Jenkins, the Oscar-winning director of Moonlight, is one of its producers.
The content creator turned film-maker learned their craft by shadowing the director Jane Schoenbrun on I Saw the TV Glow, her equally hip film from 2024.
“It was wild,” says an effervescent Victor. “What a perfect film to watch being made. So different from mine, but it had this heartbeat, this pulse I wanted. Jane is incredible. On set they’re a leader in every sense – sometimes by being hilarious at 3am, so everyone has fun, sometimes by fighting fiercely for what the film needs. Watching them rippled into my body.”
Victor’s sharply inventive film unspools in five chapters that trace the heroine’s quiet, tragicomic resilience in the aftermath of an assault by a trusted adviser. A sharp, newly tenured literature professor at her alma mater in rural New England, Agnes (played by the writer-director), endures emotional mummification as she attempts to piece her life back together. When she reunites with Lydie (Naomi Ackie), her college room-mate, who is now building a life in New York, their friendship becomes a lifeline.
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Through the pals’ conversations, memories and awkward silences, the film lays bare how trauma reverberates long after the “bad thing”, as Agnes calls it, occurs. The “bad thing” is never defined explicitly, yet it is ever present. The assault sequence is rendered as a long shot of a house, and a hurried glimpse of undone shoelaces.
“I had to truth-check myself constantly. There’s one moment where Agnes gets lighter fluid, intending to burn down her professor’s office. In an early draft she actually did it. But when I woke up the next morning I realised that wasn’t truthful. It’s not something she would actually do. So I rewrote it: she runs to her best friend with this wild idea instead. That was my constant challenge. Making sure actions were emotionally true, even if that meant the ‘plot’ was smaller.”
[ Sorry, Baby review: Eva Victor’s near-perfect debut is clever, warm and original ]
Odd as it sounds, Victor has fashioned a trauma comedy. With wry humour and poignant restraint, Sorry, Baby swerves all cliches of victimhood. There is no moment of Hollywood catharsis, only absurd confessions over bathtub chats, disastrous jury duty and an ill-concealed kitten in a jacket.
“Things don’t disappear just because you ‘work through’ them,” says Victor. “They stay with you. And they should: otherwise you’d be forgetting something important. Healing doesn’t have an end point. We’ll be healing forever. Naomi Ackie said something beautiful: trauma is like a stone thrown into a creek. At first you’re in pain trying to remove it. But, really, the stone will never leave. The work is figuring out how the water moves around it.
“Making a film about something difficult is a way of reckoning with it, looking at it directly. It doesn’t guarantee peace. Maybe moments of peace. It’s complicated. We’re all just trying to live our lives and feel better.”
Victor’s note-perfect script, drawn from their own experiences of sexual assault, makes room for poignant cringe comedy between Agnes and her awkward neighbour (Lucas Hedges) and a meaningful sandwich scene featuring the veteran actor John Carroll Lynch.
“It’s so fun that John enters the film about 75 per cent of the way through,” says Victor. “There’s a knock, a face we all know, and suddenly the film gets this burst of energy. I love that Agnes gets to hang out with someone not her age. He becomes this father figure, and it feels meaningful. He has perspective just by being older.
“In my mind she has a deep relationship with him beyond what we see. She goes back for more sandwiches. For me that scene was always about the care of a stranger. He sees Agnes clearly in that moment because he only has this one brief encounter with her. He has enough perspective to know life is long, bad things happen, but you survive. And because he doesn’t know her well, she can be honest. It’s the first time she admits, ‘Something bad happened to me.’”
Victor first gained attention for their sharp, character-driven comedy videos on social media, which included the privilege-skewering “Me Explaining to My Boyfriend Why We’re Going to Straight Pride”.
Sorry, Baby bears no resemblance to the kind of genre films that internet video creators typically gravitate towards; think RackaRacka with Talk to Me, David F Sandberg’s Lights Out or Mark Fischbach’s upcoming adaptation of Iron Lung. But the training ground is the same.
“Making one-minute videos, the point was to fit in as many jokes as possible and strip out all the air,” says Victor. “With a feature I finally got to slow down, let it breathe, allow silence. Of course, the videos taught me things, too, like how to edit for comedic timing, or watch myself perform and quickly decide whether to try again. But making a film was a long journey, and I was excited to settle into something more sustained.”
Victor’s deftly constructed screenplay reflects their college years, when they studied playwriting and performance. They have cited Anton Chekhov, Kenneth Lonergan and Annie Baker as formative influences. Victor still has a thing for Chekhov.
“I wouldn’t say no to Three Sisters! Whoever’s doing it, call me. I’m probably too old to play Olga, but I’d still do it. Actually, Natasha in my film is named after that Natasha, and my cat is named Olga, so there’s a whole Three Sisters thread in my life.”
One day I saw [Barry was following me online,” says Victor. “Then he messaged me: if I ever had a script, I should send it to Pastel
Film has been an unexpected swerve, says Victor, who was an editor at the feminist website Reductress and whose acting roles included a part in the TV series Billions.
“The movies that stuck with me were from childhood: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland in Easter Parade, Singin’ in the Rain, A Hard Day’s Night,” says Victor. “A real hodgepodge. I loved Bridesmaids. I remember seeing Moonlight at the Angelika in 2016, with the train rumbling by, and thinking: what is this? I didn’t know much about movies, but I knew it was something important and beautiful. I started watching films seriously and thought, Holy shit, this is everything. I fell in love, watched films day and night.”
Their admiration for Moonlight was eventually reciprocated. Jenkins, a fan of Victor’s online videos, was the first to suggest that Victor might parlay their videomaking skills into movie-making. Sorry, Baby was developed through Pastel, the production company that Jenkins cofounded.
“One day I saw he was following me online,” says Victor. “Then he messaged me: if I ever had a script, I should send it to Pastel. We had a meeting where he said, ‘The videos you’re making are film-making. Would you ever direct something?’
“I didn’t know. When I finally wrote this script I sent it straight to Pastel. They had seen me in a way no one else had: as a film-maker, even when I was embarrassed to admit that’s what I wanted. Sending it was terrifying; it felt so personal I thought rejection might kill me.
“But Barry and the team gave me feedback, and over two years they prepared me to direct the film. Barry himself showed up at pivotal moments: during casting, on set and in the edit room, which happened to be in the same building where [Jenkins’s] Mufasa was being cut. He kept encouraging us when we felt sick about the film.
“Honestly, I’ve only made one film, so I don’t know yet what my film-making sensibility will be going forward,” says Victor. “I just know this story felt urgent to tell, and I got to make it the way I wanted. That’s rare. I feel grateful. And also a little uncertain. But I’m excited to learn what comes next.”
Sorry, Baby is in cinemas
