Sorry, Baby: Eva Victor’s tender portrait of a postgrad in crisis wears its jokes like armour

• Reviewed from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival

Director Eva Victor got their start in a world of intensely online comedy, sharing viral skits on TikTok and writing headlines for American feminist satire website Reductress (past works include ’‘I’m Feeling Good These Days,’ Says Woman Who Clearly Does Not Get NYTimes Notifications’ and ‘Get It, Bitch! This Woman Got In The Shower’). In many ways, this languid, lived-in debut about a grad student in stasis feels like a revolt against this digital immediacy – a film of confident, Reichardt-slowness that keeps its ‘inciting incident’ behind closed doors, and takes sweet time figuring out how it wants to feel about it. Using the recognisable beats of a deadpan American indie comedy about mid-20s malaise, Victor takes an expansive view of sexual assault and its life-stalling aftermath. Victor wrote the film during lockdown with encouragement from Barry Jenkins (who became Sorry, Baby’s producer), sequestered with only their cat for company in a friend’s home in snowy Maine, and the private melancholy of that time seems to inhabit the entire film.

We know that a big, bad ‘something’ happened to Agnes, the talented English-lit grad played by Victor. But the details unfold slowly, with five chapters of their life at a Massachusetts university shown out of synch – muddying the knowledge of Agnes’s age, or what year we’re in, to show how trauma messes with memory. The one constant is their coursemate Lydie (a quick-witted and caustic Naomi Ackie). The film is trellised by their sweet, naturalistic friendship, which revitalises Agnes’s stagnated existence – but not at the cost of Lydie’s character development. The same can’t be said for their fellow students, like skittish frenemy Natasha (Kelly McCormack), whose conversations feel strangely slight for people who spend their days buried in modern literature. Lydie embraces her queerness, finds love, gets pregnant – and Agnes stays right where she left her, surrounded by precarious towers of books from their syllabus, subsisting on chunky sub sandwiches. Cinematographer Mia Cioffi Henry’s camera pays studious attention to the cluttered, dimmed spaces of Agnes’s mansard-roofed home, where 80% of the scenes take place.

The source of this stuckness is Agnes’s former thesis advisor, Preston Decker, played by Louis Cancelmi, who has the angular features of an older Disney prince and a face that retains the menace of one of the most ghoulish characters in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), a film where there was stiff competition.

Decker tells Agnes that their observations are “extraordinary”, and Victor shows the invigorating effect of his trusted praise in small, elegant details – a private smile to a text, the way Agnes clutches their thesis on ‘the art of the short story’ to their chest. But all that is obliterated by a meeting we never see. Shot from the outside, with daylight turning to night, Decker’s New England home starts to feel like Amityville real estate. The camera lingers so long it becomes surreal, as though a giant hand might pluck it from the frame. Agnes emerges dishevelled, and in a memorably daring one-take tracking shot, we follow them from the house to their car. Victor captures the potent absurdity of an experience like this – how the violation itself can feel so hazy, while memories of an untied shoelace or missing trouser button are clear as ice.

Michaela Coel’s groundbreaking series I May Destroy You (2020) took a shapeshifting, near sci-fi approach to the after-effects of sexual assault that differs greatly from the quotidian style of Sorry, Baby, but both deploy dark humour as armour. In the face of the bureaucratic doctors and university officials who fail Agnes, uncomfortable jokes and non-sequiturs become forms of defiance – in one great moment, Agnes’s rude doctor announces he’ll perform a cervical smear, only for Lydie to break the tension with “hmm… yum”.

Victor’s also excellent at spearing the platitudes of shallow pseudo feminist support – “We know what you’re going through. We are women”, say the university reps, having revealed that Decker will not be held accountable – doubly useless, given that Agnes alludes to being non-binary (Victor also uses a mix of they/she pronouns).

Agnes continues to thrive professionally, and is made English professor. But everything from their thesis pages to a new office (formally Decker’s) now feels tainted – as though a mouse has scurried across the surface of their life. Reality, it seems, is something she must strain a little harder than others to perform – when lecturing an undergrad class on Lolita, Agnes wears what looks like a ‘college professor’ Halloween costume of baggy tweeds. Victor has been open about the film’s influences – Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016) and Kenneth Lonergan’s New York teen psychodrama Margaret (2011). And there’s a familiar Gerwigian mumblecore quality to Agnes’s casual relationship with safe, adoring neighbour Gavin (a wonderfully cast Lucas Hedges, once the lovable musical theatre nerd Danny in Lady Bird (2019)). But what sets Sorry, Baby’s overtold student-professor plot apart is the disarming wryness of its tone, one set entirely by Victor’s presence. They possess an Old Hollywood allure – dark hair, pale skin and a Joan Crawford-tendency to lead with their teeth. That, combined with Victor’s flat affect and deep, plangent voice somehow makes Agnes’s deadpan line deliveries feel ten times funnier and their rare disclosures of pain more devastating. With this film, Victor inhabits the naked uncertainty that hangs in the air after a punchline, and asks us to join them there.

► Sorry, Baby is in UK cinemas from 22 August.