A huge smash, critically acclaimed and an audience favorite at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, the dark comedic indie “Sorry, Baby” sold to A24 for $8 million at the festival. The film, written and directed by and starring comedian/actor Eva Victor (“Billions”), premiered at the festival and generated a bidding war among several distributors.
READ MORE: ‘Sorry, Baby’ Review: Eva Victor Confronts Sexual Assault From A Different Perspective [Sundance]
It’s a seemingly unlikely tale for a dark comedy about sexual assault and surviving sexual assault. Still, all the accolades and love for the picture demonstrate how ultimately heartening and inspiring the picture is, on top of some of its dark, twisted humor. Dare one say feel good? Maybe that’s a bridge too far, but the way “Sorry, Baby” illustrates the melancholy of being stuck in the past, the heartbreak of trauma, but also the resilience to take those first baby steps beyond the pain that has denied us growth, love and happiness, is a wonderful thing to behold.
Victor, who got her start with hilarious viral social media videos that led to a career of writing and performing, stars as Agnes, a young college professor who is recovering from sexual assault. Told non-linearly like fleeting memories from the past and present, Naomi Ackie (“I Wanna Dance with Somebody”), co-stars as Agnes’ best friend Lydie, and friendship-as-lifesavers is also a crucial part of the movie.
Co-starring Lucas Hedges, John Carroll Lynch, Louis Cancelmi, and Kelly McCormack, “Sorry, Baby” was produced by filmmaker Barry Jenkins and his team of frequently collaborating producers, Adele Romanski, Mark Ceryak, and Frank Ariza.
Upon the limited release of “Sorry, Baby” in New York and Los Angeles, we spoke to Victor about her terrific film, which also happens to be one of the best directorial debuts in recent memory.
I adored this movie when I saw it at Sundance. Such an incredible mix of dark comedy, but also a very dark subject matter that’s treated thoughtfully and heartbreakingly. The difficult question to start without, uhhh, getting too personal, is what inspired it?I can tell you, I really wanted to write a movie about someone trying to heal and the non-linear experience of healing, and the aftermath of violence that’s not her fault.
So that was what I wanted to tackle, and I wanted to write about friendship and love and how friendship can be lifesaving and can keep you going. So, that was my intention. Then, I spent a lot of time figuring out structurally how to support talking about healing versus violence in a structural way in making the screenplay and the film.
I also wanted to posit whether it’s possible to have a film full of dramatic tension without seeing violence. Since we’ve become pretty desensitized to it—this violence on screen. And I wanted to see what a film looked like without it and deal with things around it.
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I was going to say— the way you shot the assault scene, all from the outside of the house with a time lapse from dusk to evening—it’s very powerful and cinematic in its own way. The audience understands what happens, even though they haven’t seen it, making it all the more chilling and unsettling. Then that tracking shot behind her when she walks home, it’s excruciatingly long in a good way.Honestly, what made me think of it is that I saw this film after I shot this movie and did those shots. But it was cool to see this film called “A White, White Day”; the first five to ten minutes are just a time lapse on a house over the years. It’s so cool. It’s Norwegian, but that could be wrong, so that’s not something we can quote if it’s not true [laughs].
But I wrote it that way. I wanted it to be—in the script it’s “We wait, we wait. The time changes, we wait, we wait.” And I honestly wanted to shoot the whole walking home, getting in the car sequence during the magic hour, but I found out that the budget required for shooting something in magic hour meant going back to the same place four days in a row, and it was a tiny film. So, we ended up, doing the magic, blue hour shot, but then getting also everything in the night after that, but I’m a sucker for wide shots, wides wides. And I’m a sucker for long shots, honestly. And it was part of the DNA of the film to sit in stillness as much as we could be in a tableau whenever it made sense to be.
One of the themes I loved in the movie is the idea of the past and the future tugging at her as she’s stuck in the middle. There’s obviously this past traumatic event she grapples with, is not present because of it, and then there are hopeful things in the future around her too; her best friend’s having a baby, and a new cat enters her life.Yeah, I love that you said, the past and the present, or the past and the future, are tugging at her. I feel that’s a great way of putting it. That’s how I always talked about it: I don’t think anyone ever understood it [laughs]. But I kept trying to use these words—there are all these little ghosts in the film that you see in the first chapter, and are explained as we get more information about the past. Her boots and her relationship to wearing them [ed. note: she’s wearing the boots during the assault and then kicks them off and throws them out when she gets home].
And when they’re on the beach, she’s like, “Is your baby the size of a mouse?” Because mice are ingrained in her head from her traumatic event with the mouse, there are all these things along the way that hopefully highlight how time is moving for her versus for her friend. Time is moving so slowly for Agnesr Agnes is trying to run through mud, while Lydie goes from seeing herself as queer to having a baby with her partner. They have real different timelines of what these four years mean. But yes, the past and future tug, and isn’t that crazy? That’s life, I guess.
That’s a pretty accurate depiction of any traumatic event, violence, a break-up, a death, a divorce, one person often can’t get unstuck from pain and psychic trauma and the rest of the world speeds by in a way that’s almost callously free compared to the protagonist.Honestly, it’s a gift. Lydia’s choice of life and not staying stuck is a real gift she gives to herself and Agnes.  
Agnes needs to keep moving, and she needs to follow what she needs to do. And the reason why I imagine Lydia and Agnes having a beautiful, lifelong relationship is because Lydia prioritized herself and left, even though Agnes was struggling and there is, at the end of it, they just both have a ton of love for each other, and their relationship will shift, but it will always have this, thread of deep love and understanding.
Yeah, the friendship throughout is fantastic and one of the most incredibly honest and real female friendships I’ve seen on screen in some time. But I wanted to talk humor, because sexual assault is not a topic to be treated lightly, but you manage to incorporate all this dark humor, which feels like a disarming trick, but well-threaded thing.The calibration usually worked the other way, “let’s not have it be funny here. I found that if I wrote something really sad, I would pretty much instinctually write something funny next. And “funny” is, a loose term,  some stuff is, joyful and giggly—the scenes where Lydia and Agnes are in this fun vibe that hopefully feels addictive, they’re just, loving each other, and that can be funny. But there are darker scenes in films where people laugh during the doctor scene, but they laugh because of a heightened element. Seeing the writer’s hand in that moment, a little further from reality, is cathartic. So, the laughs come there and then, John Caroll Lynch is super fucking funny Lucas Hedges is so funny. They’re just these sweet guys. So that’s always a relief too.
Yeah, my favorite comedy in the film is this kind of ironic, absurdist indignity she has to face, even though she’s the victim.Yep, totally.
So, what are you doing next? This is a terrific debut, and I want to see much more from you.It’s been a second since I’ve been in my private creative little hole where I get to explore ideas. Stephen King wrote this book about writing—which I feel like is already super famous—but he says this thing, “When you’re writing, the door is closed, and the second you open the door and give it to someone, the door is open, and you can’t ever close the door again.” And so, I’m in the zone of the door is closed, but I look forward to the future, and I did fall in love with filmmaking while making this, and I’m super, I’m super excited to get back into that place where I’m watching film and learning, because that’s, that’s the most inspiring thing.
“Sorry, Baby” opens June 27 in New York and Los Angeles and starts expanding through July 25 via A24.