Eva Victor wants you to know that the cat is okay. “I feel like we should have put out a PSA!” they tell me at a recent festival screening. Victor, the writer, director, and star of their debut movie, Sorry, Baby, is referring to a moment in the film in which her character, Agnes, stumbles upon an abandoned kitten in a grocery store parking lot. A Bad Thing had happened to Agnes, and in the wake of it, suddenly reliant on her friends and community for her own wellbeing, Agnes becomes a caretaker in her own right. It’s easy to fall in love with a kitten, but that sensitivity — both Agnes’ impulsive cat adoption and Victor’s insistence that you won’t have to watch it suffer in their movie — serves as a window into Sorry, Baby’s remarkable empathy. Stories on trauma have reached enough of a saturation point to become politically fraught and even occasionally regressive; Sorry, Baby’s finesse proves that tenderness is essential no matter how crowded the landscape.
Agnes is a grad student who lives in a New England college town with her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie). They’re both taking the same writing workshop, but it’s Agnes who wins the attention of their professor, Decker (Louis Cancelmi), who insists Agnes’ writing is exceptional and invites her closer to serve as a mentor. Then, The Bad Thing. That language is deliberate: Sorry, Baby is a movie made by and for survivors of sexual assault, and Victor is careful to note the ways in which language, for better and for worse, holds power as victims navigate trauma’s aftermath.
That’s not to say Sorry, Baby is at all avoidant; in a standout monologue, Agnes details every harrowing moment she’d suffered with Decker, and those in her orbit less equipped or inclined to approach her assault with compassion (doctors and court workers among them) don’t hesitate to use language Victor knows might sting fellow survivors. Victor’s tendency to both acknowledge the painful realities of an act of violence and approach their audience gently is a balm in a moment in which sensitivity has been co-opted and lambasted by a host of bad actors. It’s a tightwire act and a welcome reminder that taking care around language supersedes conservative eyerolling and disaffecting algospeak, that the words we use concern and affect the people around us.
Sorry, Baby is divided into five, non-chronological chapters: We first meet Agnes and Lydie in Agnes’ New England home, Agnes having become an English professor at their alma mater, Lydie returning to share news of her pregnancy. Their time together is briefly interrupted by Gavin (Lucas Hedges), Agnes’ Ohiocore neighbor and budding romantic interest who serves as a formidable complement to Eva Victor within the film’s comedic engine. The movie’s unconventional sequencing is considered and precise, a fine showcase for Victor’s capacity to construct a story less bent on emotional devastation than providing a sweatless hand to hold. But it’s also a testament to the fragments of trauma that endure even as one works to reconstruct a life. There are wisps of the yet-defined Bad Thing even through Agnes’ and Lydie’s happy reunion — a diverted glance here, a panic attack there — and as she leaves to return to New York, Lydie gives Agnes a command as simple as it is severe: “Don’t die.”
Tracing the borders of a life after an assault is an impossibly heavy task, which makes Sorry, Baby’s thrilling sense of humor all the more miraculous. Somehow, this movie about an enduring trauma is gunning for — and scoring — laughs at the back of the room. Eva Victor first broke into the spotlight through comedy, crafting front-facing videos and stand-up and spinning headlines for The Reductress, and those hard-won sensibilities show their face in the movie’s expert timing and punchlines. Watching Agnes lie her way through a meet-cute with Gavin churned enough laughs to miss lines during my screening, and Victor’s presence positions an otherwise dour courtroom scene into one of the film’s funniest moments. In a rare instance or two, going for the joke skirts the lines of plausibility; the aforementioned moment with an insensitive doctor recalls Broad City’s duller polemics. More often, though, Sorry, Baby’s comedy is brilliant, another reminder of the movie’s insistence to sit there beside you through it all.
Victor’s background in comedy may have equipped them to approach Sorry, Baby, as a multihyphenate, but the movie is far from a solo effort. “When you’re a multihyphenate, you’re forced to ask for help a lot and to rely on those around you. Those people end up wearing multiple hats, too,” Victor tells me. “You write a movie privately, where it’s just you and the page, and eventually you end up in this whole group of people directing it.” Part of what helps to separate Sorry, Baby from the myriad coming-of-age stories content to posit trauma as a MacGuffin is its quiet strength as an ensemble piece. Ackie’s Lydie is a portrait of compassion and the sort of testament to female friendship that warms Pedro Almodóvar’s oeuvre; Louis Cancelmi balances writerly prestige and menace on the same fingertip; in a career of scene-stealers, John Carrol Lynch enters late into the picture to remind you of his muscle as an ace in the hole. That care in casting reflects Sorry, Baby’s belief in the role of community in healing. The movie is smart to avoid life-goes-on flavored platitudes; it becomes excellent in its curiosity toward the way relationships break and bend and bloom after the unthinkable.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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