Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby Is the Most Promising Debut at Sundance This Year

It’s less than enticing to advertise a Sundance movie by noting that it’s the directorial debut of an actor-comedian who rose to prominence for their viral videos. Such is the case for the film Sorry, Baby, from writer-director-star Eva Victor, mostly known for popular social media videos that have caught the attention of, among many others, Sorry, Baby producer Barry Jenkins. One might expect a content creator’s first film to be glib and flimsy, a failure to convert short-form sketch into a full film.

Sorry, Baby proves that assumption wrong. Victor’s film, which premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday, is a meticulously crafted wonder, the most auspicious debut I’ve seen here this year. Victor maintains the oddball humor that first endeared her to her followers, but she also incorporates whole other, previously unseen facets of her considerable talent. Sorry, Baby is funny, sad, thoughtful, and specific, a keenly observed portrait of a woman blown off course by a traumatic incident.

Yes, there is a trauma at the center of the film, a sexual assault. But Sorry, Baby is no belabored, lugubrious drama about psychological scars, nor a maudlin take on the healing process. Victor has a far more delicate touch, sketching out how this violation stretches out across her character’s life, reshaping and informing it in ways both subtle and profound.

Victor plays Agnes, an academic living in coastal New England. We see Agnes at various points across a five-or-so-year span, in the days before she’s assaulted by her trusted graduate advisor and in the years after. Sorry, Baby is broken up into chapters, jumping forward and backward in time to create a kind of collage of the incident’s impact. The moment itself is kept behind closed doors—literally. Victor’s camera remains fixed on the street outside, letting day cede to night until Agnes bursts through the front door and into a wholly changed reality. It’s a terribly effective way to communicate what’s happened. We do get more details later, stated plainly to Agnes’s best friend, Lydie (Naomi Acke). But Sorry, Baby is less interested in the grim mechanics of the event and more in how a person like Agnes, so sharp and mordant, might process it.

She mostly retreats, shrinking her life down to the college where she becomes a professor, a cherished rescue cat, and a neighbor she sometimes sleeps with (he’s played with winsome sensitivity by Lucas Hedges). Agnes’s life brightens whenever Lydie drives up from New York City for a visit, a person in motion happily breaking Agnes’s stasis. Lydie, so warmly played by Ackie, is moving on with the regular business of life—getting married, having a baby—while Agnes remains almost frozen in time. Her career advances, but little else does. She seems stuck in this place, in the same house, unable to leave and venture into a world she no longer trusts.

Victor stages all this in modest vignettes, most of them wryly amusing with an undercurrent of sadness. The film resists psychological exposition, preferring instead to let us infer things about Agnes’s life through well-placed context clues. Sorry, Baby is carefully written and directed, patient and focused and confident in its own peculiar rhythms. Victor shadowed another director for a time before making her own film, and shot a few test scenes to figure some things out. But much of her ability seems organic, a talent innate to the whir and buzz of her mind. How exciting to see that, when so much else at Sundance this year has played as strained pastiche of someone else’s work.

What’s perhaps most striking about Sorry, Baby is its firm sense of control, knowing when to turn the dial from light to somber or wistful to cheerful. There’s no sloppiness here, and only a few scenes that maybe stretch the film past Victor’s well-drawn boundaries—a hospital visit that leans a little too hard on caustic comedy, a side character who’s a bit too cartoonish for an otherwise grounded film. Sorry, Baby is stylish in a humble way, restrained in its camera work and deftly deploying Lia Ouyang Rusli’s lilting, occasionally whimsical score. There’s so much here that could tilt into cloying Sundance cliché, but Victor gently guides her film away from that edge.

At the center of everything is Victor’s performance, a marvel of nuanced expressions and sideways line readings. She makes us love Agnes, but also allows the audience to grow a little frustrated with her, with the way she masks a deep want or need with a curlicue little joke or deflection.

The film makes no judgment about whether Agnes should shake things up, should make some big decision that will somehow right the ship of her life. But it does force us to consider the loss of what could have been. A haunting presence surrounds Agnes’s domestic routine, mournful and flecked with danger. That sorrow is not entirely suffocating, though. Victor allows for rays of light to touch Agnes, and for Agnes to emit her own.

Sorry, Baby ends with a practical kind of benediction, one that acknowledges the risk and damage of being alive but offers a hand extended in comfort and understanding. It’s empathetic to Agnes’s experience, to Victor’s, and to anyone else who might be similarly struggling to move through the world in the way they once did.