Watching Sorry, Baby was a form of cinematic catharsis I didn’t know I needed until the film was long over and I was sitting alone in the theater, staring at a blank screen. Director, writer, and star Eva Victor has crafted a personal journey through a hellacious experience no one should endure and yet so many sadly do: typically in silence, and without any form of traditional justice afterward. They must heal from this trauma on their own, worried the outside world will look at them differently if the truth of what happened were made public or, heaven forbid, authoritatively spoken aloud.
Told over four years, the film begins with two best friends, Agnes (Victor) and Lydie (Naomi Ackie), reuniting for a weekend holiday at the former’s home — before it suddenly backtracks to when they were college roommates working on their theses. During a meeting with her advisor, Agnes is sexually assaulted, and the trauma of that moment understandably consumes almost every facet of her life thereafter.
Victor is unrelenting and pulls zero punches. But she also doesn’t comfort the audience with easy answers, finds humor in some unexpectedly bleak places, and dynamically showcases how the power of friendship and found family can help heal even the most destructive of wounds. It’s an astonishingly powerful work, overflowing with genuine emotion and unambiguous empathy. As feature-length directorial debuts go, calling this one extraordinary would undersell Victor’s achievement considerably.
I had the pleasure to sit down with the talented filmmaker hours before Sorry, Baby had its Pacific Northwest premiere as the closing night feature of the 2025 Seattle International Film Festival. Our 20-minute conversation could have gone on for another 20 hours as far as I was concerned. Here are the edited transcripts:
Sara Michelle Fetters: When you’re making a film that is obviously this personal, how do you disconnect yourself from the directing and the acting? How do you make sure to invest yourself emotionally into the performance you’re giving but stay objective enough to handle everything behind the camera? After all, you’re in every single scene!
Eva Victor: There are a few scenes I’m not in, but those didn’t make it into the movie. In the edit, we realized that you kind of need Agnes everywhere. You can’t take a break from her story. It has to be one straight line of emotional truth.
To do both, it takes a lot of preparation. I always said, if the movie was going to be bad, it wasn’t going to be because I was not prepared. It would be bad because I didn’t innately have what it took to be a director. Once you start production, time is ticking. I storyboarded the whole movie. I worked with an acting coach for like five months before we started shooting. Did rounds and rounds of shot listing with my director of photography [Mia Cioffi Henry]. I gave myself the gift that I would be prepared enough beforehand that if something magic happened, I wouldn’t be caught off-guard or be afraid that I wasn’t prepared enough to capture it, because I wouldn’t have already taken care of all of the basics.
Honestly? It was a very emotional thing. Very meaningful. When you’re writing about this sort of thing, it’s an experience that’s so devastating and bizarre. You're reckoning with the fact that someone is going to decide where your body is going to go without your permission, and that breaks all of the ideas you have of the rules of the world. But, by directing myself as an actor, this was such a special thing. I was choosing where to put my body in every moment. No one else was telling me what to do with myself. There is something meta in that, and it was really important to me, especially as it concerns this topic.
In a big-picture way, it was special to take on both roles. In retrospect, I do think I would have been upset had someone else been telling me what to do. I’m glad I did it.
SMF: How do you regroup, though? In the courtroom scene, when you’re facing down the prosecutor; in a later moment with John Carroll Lynch; the tracking shot where you leave the professor’s house in shattered silence: As an actor, you put yourself through such an emotional tumult. How do you back away from that, regroup, and, as a director, call cut and let everyone know you’re going to shoot it all again?
EV: Yes! That’s the question, right?
When you prepare for so long, there is a real excitement to do it for real. It’s like sports. There’s all this adrenaline to get out there and perform, to say the words. There is this catharsis and this strange joy when you actually do it, even when what you’re dealing with is so emotionally horrifying.
It was interesting. Some scenes I thought would be the most emotional to shoot ended up feeling a lot less than that. Others that I thought wouldn’t be so bad took a lot out of me. Like, the journey scene from the house was crazy emotional to shoot. I was totally safe the whole time — we had such an outstanding crew, but I was struck by how my character was feeling more exposed than I imagined it was going to be. I actually wrote that scene to be more comedic, but when we shot it, I immediately understood how important it was for Agnes. In the edit, I knew we needed to surround her with the appropriate ambiance because she was feeling so exposed.
The most emotional part for me was during the edit. It was an experience of watching someone go through this, and I was having a difficult time divorcing the fact that it was me on the screen and not the character. I was having a tough time processing that this horrible thing was happening to this person, because I kept seeing that it was me. After a while, I did finally get disassociated from myself and then I could really see the movie. But it was a bit of an up-and-down getting that down.
SMF: Talking about that edit, you’ve structured your film in a way that challenges the audience to pay attention. You start near the end, rewind to the beginning, and then finish with the climax. How do you keep the audience onboard and yet also stay true to what this story is and how it must be told so Agnes’s journey can be fully captured?
EV: The one thing about the edit of this film is that there were no stones left unturned. The script was basically written in the way everything is structured now, but we also tried every conceivable combination when we were attempting to put it all together. The edit was like this great puzzle in experimentation, in discovering where everything goes right and everything goes wrong. What was interesting was that we learned that if you do not have those 20 minutes of outright friendship and joy right up front, 75% of the way through the film, audiences care significantly less about what happens to both Agnes and Lydie.
We did tons of trying! We tried so many combinations. But what I learned was that, if you don’t start with the friendship, if you don’t take the appropriate time with their friendship, the film does not work. The film is about the friendship! It is about healing and finding joy. You need to center that friendship, center the joy, and center the love because then, when you go back in time, you already care about the two of them, and I also think it makes the challenging bits hit so much harder.
Look, as a society, I think we have a real fear of people who have survived this type of trauma.
Subconsciously, I think we decide to flatten them. We don’t want them to become real people, because then they cannot become real in the same way we are. We put them in a box filled with tragedy and that’s the end of it. So, it was important to me to give Agnes a fighting chance to be a whole person and to have the audience fall in love with both her and Lydie and feel their affection for one another. This would make it so that by the time you see what happens to [Agnes], you would not be able to dismiss her. You couldn’t put her in that tragedy box, because she could be you. You relate to Agnes. She’s smart, and funny, and silly, and she’s wonderful. She’s just like us.
SMF: This isn’t about me, so I don’t want to go into that but, as a trauma survivor, I think the greatest thing about this film is that it made me feel whole. I felt seen. The crazy thing is that you accomplish this without offering closure or any easy answers. Instead, you give Agnes her room to heal. Nothing more. Certainly nothing less. That, to me at least, seems to be the most important element.
EV: Thank you for saying that. My idea was to keep the focus on these four years. On this particular time. I think, right after when something like this happens, everyone around you is initially scared for you and they want to be there, but then they have to go back to their own lives. Time doesn’t stop, but it moves in a different way for people like Agnes. I needed the film to be about the degrees of healing that can happen during this time, but it also needed to feel true.
Agnes becomes selfish, but not in a bad way — it’s what she has to do to survive. Then, by the end of the movie, she’s willing to watch someone else’s baby for 20 minutes. That’s not a huge thing, but it is for her. It’s Agnes starting to see outside of herself. I don’t know when you’re supposed to get over something like this, or if you’re even supposed to get over it at all. It’s a part of you, and things like this change people forever. So, this is one glimpse into a moment of healing. That was the degree of transformation that I wanted to show because healing isn’t linear, it isn’t easy, and I do not know when, if ever, it stops.
SMF: Speaking of Lydie, can we chat for a moment about Naomi Ackie?
EV: Yes. Let’s. She can do anything.
When we read together, I’d already seen her in Lady Macbeth, The End of the F***ing World, and the Whitney Houston biography [Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody], and she was incredible. I was so excited when she said yes. Then she went off and made Mickey 17 and Blink Twice before coming back to make this. Then all those movies came out and I was like, are you f-ing kidding me? Naomi can do anything! She’s crazy. Just phenomenal.
Naomi’s one of the best actors — maybe the best actor — of our generation. I love her.
SMF: The friendship between Lydie and Agnes is so pure. My two favorite moments are early on, when the characters are in their dorm room and she tells you to get your feet off the wall, and then right near the end, that look she has in her eyes when you say you will watch the baby so she and her wife can go for a walk.
EV: I had chills watching her. The movie would not be possible without her performance in it. It was almost like casting a romantic lead. I always said when I was casting that Agnes was the moon and Lydie was the sun, so when Naomi came in, I immediately knew our sun had arrived. There was this moment in our read together when Lydie says, “I want to make a really good person,” and when Naomi said it, it was so powerful. There was this hush in the room. In every moment, Naomi is just so truthful. It’s a total gift to work with an actor like that.
SMF: Silly question but, is Sorry, Baby a clandestine Manchester by the Sea spin-off? I mean, we don’t get closure on what happens next with Lucas Hedges’s character in that.
EV: [laughs] Ha! Well, I hope not, as that movie is so much more depressing than ours.
Seriously, though, I think that is a compliment. Manchester is a beautiful film, and Lucas is incredible in it. To be mentioned in the same sentence is kind of incredible. The way it looks, how it was shot with all those blues and grays, that was honestly an inspiration for how Mia and I approached this.
Lucas is really one of the funniest guys. He’s so fun to be around. I’m so excited for him. I tell you: he’s going to write something soon that’s just going to blow everyone away. He’s the best.
SMF: Another thing, this picture is so delightfully Queer, but never in ways that seem forced or inauthentic.
EV: I was excited to have all of these things happen for Lydie, but also, how much happens for her over these four years highlights how little happens to Agnes. It feels like this fairytale shit for her. But then when we meet her partner, she’s like just so normal. Almost boringly normal. But still cool, you know?
When I wrote this, it was like five years ago, and I was just at the beginning of my own gender experience, so I’m truly touched that this person from so long ago wrote in all these neat moments. Like that court scene where Agnes is filling out the jury duty form and draws a line between the M and F boxes. I mean, how did I write that in 2021? How did I know? It’s such a snapshot of a time in my life that made its way into the movie.
Funny story: There was someone who was trying to get me to cut that scene out. I was like, “No f-ing way! That’s a huge f-ing part of the movie! I’m never cutting it!” Then, when we showed it, all these people told me how much they loved that moment.
I think, with a trauma like this, it forces you to rebuild who you are from the beginning. You question all of the rules that you think exist, and then you realize none of those rules are true, especially when someone can just grab you and do whatever they want to your body without your consent. So, what rules? We live in a world with all of these pretend rules. So, that moment, it’s like this beautiful thing. Why should Agnes fill in those boxes?
SMF: While no one anywhere should ever experience anything like what Agnes does, in some strange way, an experience like this does give you permission to put up a middle finger to conformity.
EV: It does. It’s like, no one is going to take care of me, so I have to take care of myself. I have to figure out who I am. Time is moving slower. I have to look at everything and see what I want to keep, what I want to change, and what I need to get rid of.
SMF: How cool is it to have someone like John Carroll Lynch show up for one scene and blow the doors off?
EV: So cool. You have no idea. He called me after he said yes and wanted to talk about how much the script meant to him. I couldn’t believe it. I was so moved that someone of his age and experience was so moved. I was so grateful. There are no parental figures in the film, and his presence gives Agnes a dad for the day. It was a really important moment even though it was only one scene.
You’ll love this, but it was written that he made sandwiches for the both of them and, he was like, I wouldn’t do that. I’d only make a sandwich for her. I was hesitant and was like, are you sure? John was insistent. He started talking about Fargo and how he only made breakfast for Frances McDormand and that he didn’t make breakfast for himself too. It was similar here. His character would be worried about Agnes and would want to comfort her in the way he knew how, by making her that sandwich.
And it works so much better. He’s so smart.
SMF: What has this whole experience been like for you? Making the film, showing it at Sundance, here in Seattle for SIFF, other festivals? Having A24 release it with all its marketing muscle and cachet? The overwhelmingly positive reactions from critics and audiences alike?
EV: It’s weird to realize that everyone in the audience has in either a direct or an indirect way a relationship with this topic. But I also feel a lot less alone. It’s been wonderful.
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