Eva Victor Examines Lasting Effects of Trauma in Feature Debut
DIRECTOR: EVA VICTOR/2025
Following the year with “the bad thing,” Agnes defines her years by a baby, questions, and one excellent sandwich.
These are narrow definitions for Agnes’s (Eva Victor) narrow view of the world. Though taped sheets of paper cover the panes of her farmhouse windows, the college town she’s lived in since grad school still peeks through. In Little Women, a New England winter evokes idyllic memories—here the trees are just barren. Ever since “the bad thing,” she has been fixed where it happened. She has finished her degree and her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) has moved away, but she’s still reading, teaching, and panicking in cluttered rooms and a cramped car. Is she unable to deal with her trauma or is she unwilling? Does she keep it a secret from most because she is introverted or because she is numb? She has no guide on how to heal.
Victor, also writing and directing a feature for the first time, identifies as a survivor of sexual assault, and Sorry, Baby examines the process of rebuilding afterward. Though Victor’s IMDb credits list back to 2014 as a performer, this announces a screen presence with staying power. The sardonic, awkward Agnes is a fresh creation, somehow both separate from Victor yet indivisible from the author. (Not unlike Diablo Cody’s snarky protagonist in Juno.) In the most memorable scene, Agnes describes her rape to Lydie from a bathtub, relaying the questions and thoughts she experienced earlier in the evening. The scene’s impact comes both from Victor’s acting and from the restraint in writing. We are never invited to be “objective” viewers of the event—we only agonize outside the house as the sun sets. But is living through Agnes’s description of it worse than seeing it? The rape is a fact at this point, so we can never hope for her escape, and because we only hear about it from her, we never wonder if any of it could be consensual. But because she is the kind of person who defines a year by a sandwich, the tone pivots the next morning when an unfeeling doctor inspires a wave of sarcasm. In Agnes, the film is able to hold the life-altering weight of assault and the dry humor she uses to cope with it.
This insular view is key to both the best of and the weakest parts of the film. A confined focus gives authentic detail to the college town feel (cozy yet limiting) and to Lydie and Agnes’s best friend/roommate relationship (unconditional though only possible in your early twenties). But the longer the runtime, the more navel-gazing it becomes, sacrificing development for any character beyond the central friendship. It’s wonderful to see Lucas Hedges in films again, but his presence is the only reason Agnes’s neighbor Gavin has any interest. Kelly McCormack steals a few scenes as another grad student with no filter, but she and the other women (often comically) insensitive to Agnes leave more to be explored. Sorry, Baby examines the lasting cicatrix of assault with care and thoroughness, but not much else.