Sorry, Baby: Finding Good Things Amongst the Bad

by Nirica S.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

I’ve been frustrated lately by the increasing number of films that ostensibly engage with questions of misogyny, trauma, and sexual assault, but leave me feeling empty, or worse, betrayed. At times, they treat their subject matter flippantly, offering their protagonists a faux-feminist “victory” over their attackers, as in Blink Twice or Poor Things. Others, like Promising Young Woman, work to remove power from their protagonists entirely, leaving us with, what? Just another brutal reminder of the power of misogyny, and the fact that rapists live in plain sight. Neither is a movie I particularly want to see. And neither feels particularly real either, sidestepping a hard reality in favour of some sort of statement. 

Which is what makes Eva Victor’s debut film, Sorry, Baby (2025), so deeply affecting. There aren’t big statements to be found here. There isn’t a totalizing sense of trauma that suffuses the film, defining every minute of the protagonist’s life. There’s no “winning.” Instead, there’s joy and laughter alongside fear and trauma; there’s love, humour, and hope, even when things feel the most hopeless. It’s difficult to make a movie about sexual assault funny and emotionally resonant in equal measure, but I found myself laughing out loud through my tears.

In Sorry, Baby, we meet Agnes (played by Victor) in New England. She’s a college professor, working in the same college she graduated from, and living in the house she once shared with her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie). There’s an easy, relaxed camaraderie between the two of them—making fun of men they’ve slept with until they cry, one of them brushing their teeth while the other pees. But there’s also a sense of something haunting the narrative. When Lydie wonders if it’s “a lot to be here,” Agnes replies, “Well, it’s a lot to be wherever.” Divided into chapters and in jumbled-up chronology, Sorry, Baby takes us back in time to show us the ghost, and then through the years between then and the present. Years are defined by chapter titles and defining incidents: “The Year With the Bad Thing,” “The Year with the Questions,” “The Year with the Good Sandwich.” What emerges is a slow, vibrant picture of a life before, during, and after trauma, shown to us in glimpses. 

In “The Year With the Bad Thing,” Agnes is the star pupil of her English lit class, and her professor routinely calls her “extraordinary,” a kind of attention she is pleased and flattered to receive. At his house for a one-on-one feedback session, though, he crosses a line. It isn’t hard to guess what the “bad thing” is, of course, but it happens entirely off-screen: the camera focuses only on the exterior of the house, as day turns to dusk and eventually nightfall. Agnes leaves in a rush, shoelaces untied, and drives back home, where the first thing she can tell Lydie is, “My pants are broken”—the kind of detail that is heartbreakingly real. In the weeks and months after the incident, Agnes is scared of creaks and thumps outside her front door; she looks out the curtainless windows of the house in fear of who might be lurking outside. Eva Victor is spectacular in the grounded moments of the film, like when she recounts the incident in careful detail to Lydie, or later, her frantic, frenetic energy when she considers setting fire to her attacker’s property.

But alongside the fear and the anger, there’s so much more. An absurd kind of humour underlies much of the film. Two female college administrators tell her they can do nothing to help, but that they understand what she’s going through because “we are women” (this last said with an audible question mark). Eva Victor delivers some of her lines with a perpetual look of amusement on her face, especially true in her interactions with a bumbling neighbour played by Lucas Hedges (“God bless your lost soul and have a good night,” she tells him as she shuts a door in his face). In every interaction with Lydie, there is a palpable sense of unconditional love, the kind of best friendship I’ve rarely seen so accurately portrayed and uncomplicated. And in the interim years when Lydie moves out and Agnes is on her own, a series of incidental interactions with strangers—a man who offers her a sandwich, a jury selector—remind her of the possibility of connection and growth, and of time passing. 

By the end of the movie, neither Agnes nor the viewer has all the answers, because there are no answers to get. There isn’t victory or justice, or a sense of trauma surmounted and overcome. There’s only the messiness of human life: where bad things happen, we find it in us to laugh despite everything we’ve gone through, and we are reminded that people love us and we love them.