First-time feature filmmaker Eva Victor earned the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: U.S. Dramatic award at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival for Sorry, Baby. Victor (Billions) also stars in this profoundly moving dramedy, which tackles sexual assault and its lasting effects with raw honesty.
Sorry, Baby doesn’t show the assault. The word rape is barely uttered. Instead, Victor assumes the audience knows exactly what happened. Refusing to grant the attacker any power in her story, Victor’s screenplay figuratively tosses the character onto the trash heap and laser-focuses on the survivor.
Sorry, Baby is told in chapters, and it’s not until Chapter Two-“The Year with the Bad Thing”-that the attack occurs. Before that happens, Chapter One establishes the close relationship between Agnes (Victor) and her ride-or-die best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie, Blink Twice). They share an easygoing bond, even closer than most sisters.
Agnes continues to live in the house she shared with Lydie during their college years and is now the youngest full-time professor in the English department at the college they attended. The fact she chooses to remain at this college after the bad thing happened shows her inner strength and unwillingness to allow her rapist to control her life moving forward.
Chapter Two takes the action back a few years to when they were grad students working on their theses. Professor Decker (Louis Cancelmi, also from Billions) is Agnes and Lydie’s thesis advisor and a fan of Agnes’ writing. Life for Agnes, up until this point, has been relatively good. And then the bad thing happens.
It’s during the period immediately following Agnes’ sexual assault that both Victor’s writing and acting really shine. Victor convincingly portrays Agnes’ recounting of the rape to Lydie, capturing a sense of shock and dissociation, as if the event were experienced from outside herself, through a blurry filter. It’s also from this point forward in the film that Naomi Ackie’s Lydie is fully developed as a fiercely loyal friend who would bury a body if asked without pausing to consider the ramifications. (We could all use a Lydie in our lives.)
When Agnes brings home a kitten, Lydie tells her to do whatever she needs. And when Agnes wants to burn down her rapist’s office, Lydie volunteers to do it for her. Would Agnes begin to heal without Lydie? Yes. But having Lydie at her side makes the process much less scary. Agnes doesn’t have to go through the stages of trauma recovery alone.
Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby is more than just a solid first feature. The moving, sometimes hysterical, and often heartbreaking dramedy signals the arrival of a filmmaker with a unique voice capable of honestly portraying difficult subjects. In Agnes, Eva Victor has created a character who’s vulnerable yet resilient, a character audiences empathize with, embrace, and want to support through her journey. She’s complex, imperfect, and, most importantly, undeniably relatable.
GRADE: A
Sorry, Baby premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: U.S. Dramatic.
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