Sorry, Baby
A Review by Ava Bellows
In Sorry, Baby, Eva Victor’s character, Agnes, refers to “a bad thing that happened to me.” The line lands not with shock, but with recognition. You know what she means. You know without headlines, without flashbacks, without anyone needing to say it out loud. And the film trusts you to know — to feel it in the silence around her.
But the brilliance of Sorry, Baby lies in what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t make the bad thing the whole story. It’s not about the trauma. It’s about the after. The long, confusing, almost invisible process of trying to keep living when everything inside you has broken, and the outside world keeps expecting you to be fine.
(L-R) Naomi Ackie, Eva Victor, Credit: Courtesy of A24.
Victor — who wrote, directed, and stars — makes that clear from the first frame. The after is not dramatic. It’s not cinematic. It’s a room that’s too quiet. A couch you can’t seem to get up from. A town that feels like it might collapse if you move away, or if you don’t. Survival, in this world, means sitting in the wreckage and answering emails. Going to the grocery store. Pretending you're okay, and sometimes almost convincing yourself.
Agnes is surviving. Barely. Victor plays her with a kind of flat composure that’s instantly familiar if you’ve ever loved someone who’s gone through the unthinkable — or been that person yourself. She’s not broken in big, visible ways. She’s running on low power. And then her best friend, Lydie, shows up.
(L-R) E Naomi Ackie, Eva Victor, Credit: Courtesy of A24.
Naomi Ackie’s performance as Lydie is a revelation — warm, sharp, hilarious, achingly sincere. She’s not here to fix anything. She’s just here. She’s worried. And that small act — showing up — becomes the emotional engine of the film. Their friendship isn’t a plot device. It’s the heart. It’s messy and real and lived-in, full of old rhythms and new awkwardness, because grief changes not just the person inside it, but everyone around them. Lydie wants her friend back. Agnes isn’t sure she wants anything at all.
The film unfolds in chapters — before, after, and one ominously titled The Year With the Bad Thing. You feel that chapter coming long before it arrives. And when it does, Victor makes the boldest possible choice: she leaves us outside. The camera stays fixed on the front of the house. The light changes. The world holds its breath. Agnes steps out, doesn’t shut the door behind her, puts her shoes on without tying them, and walks to her car. We don’t see her face until she’s already in the aftermath.
It’s the most powerful moment in the film — and it happens in silence. Not because the pain isn’t real, but because the film knows what so many others don’t: we don’t need to see violence to understand its impact. We feel it in Agnes’ body, her breath, the way she moves through rooms that suddenly don’t fit anymore.
When she finally tells Lydie what happened, it’s not a big dramatic scene. It’s two friends, sitting in it. One speaking. One listening. No orchestral swells. Just the unbearable weight of being witnessed — and the delicate hope that maybe that’s enough. Maybe being heard is its own kind of healing.
Not everyone knows how to hold space for that kind of pain. The school, the doctors — they say all the wrong things. They make the bad thing worse by trying to make it palatable. Understandable. Manageable. But John Carroll Lynch appears in a later chapter with the opposite energy. Quiet, grounded, impossibly tender. He reminds Agnes — and us — how to breathe.
Eva Victor, Credit: Courtesy of A24.
The film could easily have tipped into melodrama or trauma porn. It never does. Victor keeps everything grounded in the ordinary, which is what makes it hurt so much. The camera lingers in familiar places — a porch, a kitchen, the passenger seat of a car. Spaces that hold memory and guilt and comfort and silence. These rooms aren’t just backdrops. They echo.
And somehow, in all this stillness, the movie pulses with life. It’s funny. It’s weird. It’s cozy, even. Victor’s writing is precise and cutting, full of little moments that land like gut punches — not because they’re dramatic, but because they’re true. This is what healing looks like: lonely, slow, full of false starts and awkward laughter and canceled plans. You don’t even know it’s happening while it’s happening. Sometimes it looks like nothing at all.
There’s one scene — I won’t spoil it — where two people sit in a room. One tries to say something real. The other doesn’t, or can’t, understand it, not yet. And that resistance, that push-pull between love and pain and grief and guilt and joy, becomes the emotional axis of the film. Sorry, Baby never tries to resolve that tension. It just holds it.
That’s what makes it extraordinary. It refuses resolution. There is no breakthrough moment. No triumphant swell. Because that’s not how pain works. Not how healing works. Sometimes you get better quietly. Sometimes you don’t. And sometimes, just staying is enough.
Victor has made something rare — a film that doesn’t try to explain trauma or solve grief. Instead, it honors what it means to survive without erasing the mess of it. To stay complicated. To be loved anyway.
By the end, there’s no lesson. Just a feeling — that maybe grace isn’t in the healing itself, but in the fact that you’re still here. Still breathing. Still showing up, even if you don’t know why. And maybe that’s enough.
WATCH TRAILER
SORRY, BABY
Directed by eva victor
very laboratory