At one point in “Sorry, Baby,” a new film written, directed, and starring the actor and comedian Eva Victor, the main character, an English professor named Agnes, has an anxiety attack while driving. She pulls over into the parking lot of a roadside sandwich shop and comes upon the shop’s proprietor, a warm and gruffly paternal older man. “Something pretty bad” happened to her three years ago, she tells him. Although she doesn’t elaborate, the viewer knows that a trusted professor raped her when she was still in graduate school. She has since finished her program, and her best friend and primary emotional support, Lydie, has moved to New York, prompting Agnes to fear that she herself is frozen in place. When she encounters the kindly shop owner, it’s as if he has been conjured by the precise shape of her need. He responds to Agnes’s confession by putting together a sandwich, which she eats as she recomposes herself. Three years is “not that much time,” he says. “It’s a lot of time but it’s not that much time.”
“The whole thesis of the film” is in that line, Victor told me when we met in Los Angeles this spring. “Sorry, Baby” proposes a set of ideas about the mutability of trauma: that recovery is nonlinear, that the self is fluid, that time modulates the meaning of events, that life unfolds in a mix of genres. The shop owner’s words encapsulate a belief that strangers can “see you in a way that other people can’t,” Victor said. He’s one of several indications that “Sorry Baby” takes place in a world that might be slightly magical, or at least softly impressionable to Agnes’s inner life.
As an homage to the sandwich scene, Victor and I were at a sandwich shop in the Silver Lake neighborhood. She was there when I arrived, standing to the side of the glass storefront. The café had an Instagram-ready vibe—mosaic tiles, olde-shoppe-style fonts, accents of bubblegum pink and robin’s-egg blue—but Victor was dressed as if to avoid notice, in black pants and a black sweatshirt. Her hair was drawn back in a messy bun. Waiting for our table, we sat and chatted on two of the child-size fluorescent stools outside. Time passed, and it became harder to ignore that the restaurant appeared to have forgotten about us. Presently, swapping her reticence for a politely commanding air, Victor unfolded herself from the tiny stool and approached the hostess stand. There followed a small commotion of friendliness—apologies, laughter—after which we were led to our seats and sent a free passion-fruit donut.
“Sorry, Baby,” which came out in wide release on June 27th, is stamped by Victor’s versatility. She started writing the intimate and meticulous film in earnest during the pandemic, when COVID halted the production schedule for “Billions,” the show on which she’d been playing a “genius quant” named Rian. Victor had been craving “private writing time and some reflection,” she said. She sublet her cousin’s house in rural Maine and began a contemplative, almost monastic interlude: lots of walking in the snow and the cold, lots of driving. She watched many movies and warmed many cans of split-pea soup.
When the writing was done, in 2021, Victor sent her script to Pastel, a production company headed by the director Barry Jenkins, who had cold-D.M.’d her a few months earlier, soliciting work. Victor knew she wanted to act in the feature; Jenkins suggested that she direct it, too. Pastel set up a two-day practice shoot to get Victor more comfortable behind the camera. She also shadowed her friend Jane Schoenbrun during the making of Schoenbrun’s movie “I Saw the TV Glow.” By 2024, Victor felt ready to film. She was moved by the number of people—strangers, initially—who supported her vision. “When you’re writing about someone feeling so isolated and so lonely, when the making of it becomes collaborative, that’s a special thing,” she told me. “To feel so seen and so heard” was a “profound transformation.”
The film is animated by a remarkable tenderness toward Agnes and toward survivors of sexual violence in general. With one exception, characters avoid clinical or precise description of the incident, speaking instead of “the thing,” “the bad thing,” “something really bad.” Victor glossed these euphemisms as protective. “Sorry, Baby” “tries to take care of someone watching and to have a good bedside manner,” she said. But the movie’s linguistic delicacy also evinces intimacy with trauma’s subtler effects—its inexpressibility, its senselessness. Attempting to narrate her rape to Lydie, Agnes isn’t sure which details to prioritize, or what order to put them in, and her disjointed account captures her internal confusion. “I just got up,” she says at one point, “and I grabbed my boots, and I drove home, and now I’m here.”
In “Sorry, Baby,” Agnes has a vexed relationship with time, and Victor wanted to manipulate its flow to serve the character. The movie presents the years of Agnes’s life out of order, a choice that invites us into her experience of surreal circling rather than forward movement. Victor hoped that the structure of the film, which begins in the present and doubles back, would allow viewers to form an impression of Agnes independent of the assault: “I wanted to give her a fighting chance at being complicated and interesting.” The first part of the movie “is all about these two people”—Agnes and Lydie—“and their love for each other and their joy in their friendship.” Early scenes are defined by the easy charisma of the performers and organized around the news that Lydie is pregnant. As the film proceeds, we encounter details (Victor referred to them as “little ghosts”) that seem ordinary or neutral. In one scene, Agnes is wearing a pair of chunky combat boots, and old, worn pages of her thesis are taped to her window. Later, we learn that she was wearing the same boots when she was raped; she covered her window afterward so that no one could look inside.
Narratives of female pain often traffic in the mystique of the wounded woman: we see characters from without and are seduced by their reticence, their secrets. But Victor is interested, nearly exclusively, in what such damage feels like internally. There’s something quietly radical about the way “Sorry, Baby” privileges Agnes’s subjectivity while also exploring her trauma. A detail like the pair of combat boots only becomes unsettling as we move deeper into Agnes’s perspective. Consequently, we neither leer at Agnes nor romanticize her; we aren’t waiting for a horrific revelation to resolve her enigmas and snap her into place.
This refusal to sensationalize marks a departure from many books and movies with trauma plots. As the critic Parul Sehgal has argued, such fare frequently bestows dark backstories on a protagonist in order to make her personality comprehensible. Until her past spills out, reframing her character traits as symptoms, the archetypal weeping woman remains “opaque,” Sehgal writes. But Agnes is less a creature of rarified glamour than a person struggling in ordinary ways with loneliness and disquiet. Her life, we sense, will always seem more fraught and mysterious to her than it seems to us, because it is her confidence that has been undermined, her sense of normalcy disrupted.
Victor communicates Agnes’s alienation by playing her as visibly self-conscious. She strikes stylized poses and projects a defensive theatricality; for all its naturalism, the movie itself has a mannered quality. Because many of the scenes are shot through windows or doorways, the camera can seem sympathetic to Agnes’s struggle to regain control. It’s as if the film is reflecting the character’s wish to construct careful tableaux of her own life. There’s a corresponding feeling in “Sorry, Baby” of imprisonment, maybe self-imposed. Victor said, “The image of the film in my head is Agnes looking out this closed window and trying to decide if she wants to go outside or hide inside forever.”
Victor emphasized that the structure of “Sorry, Baby” is meant to “support the film being about friendship, love, and care.” The film “decenters violence” by skimming over the event itself in favor of “one friend telling the other friend what happened and the friend holding it very well.” The assault scene is shot with particular circumspection. Agnes has gone to see her thesis adviser, Professor Decker (Louis Cancelmi), at his house. Although they’re indoors, we are shown only the outside of the building, impassive in the changing light. When she emerges, the camera stays close to the back of her head as she walks to her car, and her face remains obscured and shadowy until she gets home. Lydie is there, and she questions Agnes, at which point the camera reveals Agnes, in closeup, for the first time. “That’s a real journey of trying to give the audience the same experience as Agnes, trying to make sense of what happened, but not being seen until Lydie sees her,” Victor said. “The reason we’re given full access is because Lydie is there and is a witness, and Agnes is safe, finally.”
