Sorry, Baby Turns the World Into a Hall of Mirrors, and Only Two People See Straight
Eva Victor's staggering feature debut surrounds its heroine with a world that keeps getting her slightly wrong, and finds its deepest tenderness in the rare moments when someone finally gets her right.
By MIGUEL MATEO | JUNE 30, 2025
Eva Victor's feature debut arrives as a genuine revelation, and not the kind that word gets used for lazily. As writer, director, and star, Victor is working in total command of a tone that should not hold together on paper, grief threaded through deadpan comedy, trauma rendered without a single scene that plays as a plea for the audience's pity. What makes the film extraordinary is how thoroughly Victor understands Agnes Ward from the inside. Every flat line reading, every beat where Agnes goes somewhere else in her head mid-conversation, plays as a choice made by someone who knows exactly what that dissociation feels like and exactly how long to hold on it before it curdles into something else. It is the rare directorial debut that also contains a great performance, and rarer still that both are by the same person.
Structured in nonlinear fragments that hopscotch across the years before and after "the bad thing" happened to Agnes during her doctoral program, the film resists the shape viewers have been trained to expect from stories like this. There is no courtroom reckoning, no tidy arc toward closure. Instead Victor builds a portrait of a woman stuck slightly outside of time, teaching literature at the same New England college where she was assaulted, still living in the house she once shared with her best friend, watching everyone around her move forward while she treads water. Agnes says it plainly at one point, "I don't see myself getting older or having kids. I don't see myself," and the line lands not as a plot beat but as the thesis of the whole film.
The most quietly radical choice in Victor's screenplay is formal rather than dramatic. Nearly everyone who orbits Agnes, her coworkers, the doctor who examines her, a grocery store clerk, even Fran, the wife her best friend marries midway through the film, arrives slightly heightened, slightly caricatured, tuned just a notch too bright or too oblivious for realism. It would be easy to read this as a directing weakness in a first-timer. It is not. It is the film's argument made visible. Agnes moves through a world that keeps performing understanding at her without ever quite achieving it, and Victor's camera renders that misfire as comedy because comedy is the only register that survives contact with something this painful. Whether this heightening was calculated from the first draft or discovered in the edit, it does exactly what it needs to do, it lets the audience feel Agnes's isolation without ever being asked to simply take her word for it.
That technique only works because Victor withholds it from two people, and the contrast is the film's quiet masterstroke. Lydie, Agnes's best friend, played by Naomi Ackie with a warmth that never tips into saintliness, is never caricatured, she is simply present, imperfect, and there. And then there is Pete, the sandwich shop owner played by John Carroll Lynch, who appears for a single extended scene after Agnes pulls over mid-panic-attack outside his shop. Nothing about the scene is showy. Pete makes her a sandwich, talks to her like a person, and sends her on her way. It is the film's most quietly powerful stretch precisely because Victor refuses to inflate it, and Lynch, given maybe ten minutes of screen time, makes it feel like the whole film exhaling.
Sorry, Baby is one of the year's best films, and it announces Eva Victor as a filmmaker whose instincts, comic and devastating in the same breath, feel fully formed straight out of the gate. Naomi Ackie and John Carroll Lynch give the film's supporting performances real weight without ever pulling focus from Victor's extraordinary work in front of the camera. Where Victor goes from here is genuinely one of the more exciting questions in American film right now.
Rating: ★★★★ out of ★★★★★