Each year the Sundance film festival offers the first real string of films to watch out for in the year ahead. Last year it gave us eventual Oscar nominees in A Real Pain and A Different Man along with countless great documentaries, the program in 2023 included some great comedies in Rye Lane and Theatre Camp as well as my favourite of that year Past Lives. The 2025 lineup doesn't seem to have the same oomph of previous years, but one film that made a whole lot of noise was Eva Victor's feature debut Sorry, Baby, and I am happy to report that all the hype surrounding the film was well worth it.
Sorry, Baby follows Agnes (Victor), a professor in her late 20s struggling to readjust to life after something bad happens to her. I won't say what the 'something bad' is but if you watch the trailer or even just infer, it isn't hard to guess what happened. The film opens on Agnes' best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) coming to visit several years after the incident, then takes us back to different points in time including the year it happened and the years directly after. The narrative is mostly linear despite the injection of these different chapters, but opening on the present day was a choice I thought ended up being quite brilliant from Victor. We are immediately thrown not into the traumatic incident but into two close friends reconnecting. This allows the viewer to get a good feel for Victor's comedic sensibilities, as well as starting the film off on a lighter note which helps alleviate some of the weight from the film's more sensitive moments.
At times it feels wrong to laugh while watching this one due to the nature of its narrative, but Victor very cleverly pokes fun not at the situation itself but the very real ways in which other people can react to it. It becomes clear very early on that Agnes uses humour to cope and that allows us to laugh alongside her while also understanding the pain she is going through. Victor's performance is essential in crafting this tone, as her comedic sensibilities allow the film to be consistently entertaining, but her ability to both physically and emotionally portray the pain Agnes is feeling helps center the importance of the story.
The focus is largely on Agnes, but Naomi Ackie as Lydie was also a huge standout performance. She plays the kind of ride or die best friend I think everyone needs especially when going through a tough time, and the chemistry between her and Victor makes the friendship feel deeply authentic. John Carroll Lynch is in the film for just one scene but it is in my opinion one of the most emotionally rich of the film thanks to his brief performance. Lucas Hedges also has a fairly small role but it is crucial to Agnes' growth as a character and he was charming as always. The only performance/character that didn't do much for me was Kelly McCormack as Natasha, a sort of academic rival of Agnes. McCormack's performance is solid and she delivers some funny moments, but I didn't really find the character all that important to what Victor was going for. Oh the cat performances are also excellent, incredibly cute cats.
Visually the film is set in a small town and made for a low budget so we don't get any grand sweeping cinematography, but a lot of the framing feels very intentional and the film on the whole looks pretty great. The set design also works in tandem with the story really well just feels like it fits the characters really well. I didn't notice the score too much, but this is one of those cases where I'd consider that a good thing as it aided the emotion of the film rather than overpowering it. All in all, I thought this was a terrific debut from Eva Victor, tackling sensitive subject matter with a delicate humorous tone and crafting a cast of characters I just absolutely loved. 4.5/5
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