YNOT at the Movies

While many films reduce trauma to tidy arcs or emotional spectacle, the writer-director Eva Victor's "Sorry, Baby" (USA 2025 | 120 min.) chooses something far more honest, and far more human. It blends gallows humor, emotional nuance, and genuine warmth to explore what healing actually looks like when it's messy, slow, and deeply human. It's a sharp, disarmingly funny debut that reshapes the language of trauma and recovery through the lens of friendship, grief, and self-discovery. Eva Victor, who writes, directs, and stars, focuses not on the traumatic event itself, but on the long, nonlinear aftermath—how time distorts, how people drift, and how, sometimes, humor becomes a tool for survival.

Agnes (Eva Victor) is a young literature professor in a sleepy New England college town, who seems frozen in place while the rest of the world keeps moving. Once the top of her class, Agnes now spends her days teaching, isolating, and struggling with the lingering shock of an experience she can't yet name aloud. When her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) returns for a visit—pregnant, married, and firmly launched into her next chapter—the contrast is stark. Agnes realizes how stuck she is, and from that moment, the film begins charting her halting journey toward something like wholeness.

What makes the film stand out is its comedic tone. Victor's background in viral comedy lends "Sorry, Baby" a buoyancy that cuts through the darkness without ever trivializing it. The humor isn't at Agnes's expense. Instead, it targets the institutions and people who fail her, and the absurdity of navigating a world where everything continues as normal even when you're falling apart.

At its core, this is a film about a sustaining and uneven friendship that functions like a lifeline. Lydie is both grounding and galvanizing—a powerhouse of energy, empathy, and patience who knows how to sit with her friend in silence without trying to fix her. Their bond is deep, complicated, and patient—a kind of love story without romance, but with just as much weight.

Victor avoids easy catharsis or victimhood. Instead, the film finds meaning in the small shifts: Agnes's tentative openness to Gavin (Lucas Hedges), a shy and earnest neighbor who offers a quiet refuge; the slow erosion of her trust in her former mentor Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi); and her bruising encounters with Natasha (Kelly McCormack), a rival whose broad comedy masks her own pain. Even a roadside panic attack becomes an unexpected moment of grace, when a stranger, Pete (John Carroll Lynch), offers comfort with disarming humanity.

The film doesn't center the traumatic incident itself. In fact, the camera deliberately pulls back when Agnes first references it. Instead, the film traces how the memory lingers in the body and how self-worth, identity, and trust must be painstakingly rebuilt. The filmmaking mirrors Agnes's internal state: restrained, tender, often funny, and attuned to how time both bends and repeats during recovery.

The title "Sorry, Baby" may suggest regret, but the film is not about apologies. It offers something more generous—a hand extended in solidarity. With fierce humor, emotional precision, and a deep belief in the power of connection, this movie tells anyone who's ever been stuck: you are not alone.

"Sorry, Baby" opens in theaters on Friday, July 4, 2025.