Sorry, Baby ★★★
- 2filmcritics
- Aug 8
- 4 min read
Availability: Still showing in theaters nationally. It just became available online for rent on Amazon Prime, plex, and for a limited number of days on Spectrum TV. See JustWatch here for complete availability.
The Bad Thing
Well into the first of 5 segments (not arranged chronologically) of “Sorry, Baby,” I turned to the other half of 2 Film Critics and whispered, “do we know why she’s so sad?” referring to Agnes (French-born Eva Victor), the young student and teacher at the center of Victor’s absorbing directorial feature debut. That’s exactly the response Victor wants from the audience, and one of the ingredients of the film’s seductive energy. A young woman’s struggle with post-traumatic stress (the cause is revealed in segment 2, “The Year of the Bad Thing”), is a subject tailor-made for a weepy, victim-centered production. In Victor’s capable hands what could be turgid, cloying, overwhelmingly bleak, and—worst of all—obvious, is instead enigmatic, emotionally complex, now and then funny, and curiously entertaining. You won’t learn the meaning of the title until the final scene.
You won’t learn the meaning of the title until the final scene.
My question was prompted in part by the opening scene, with Agnes, seemingly happy and untroubled, and her visiting gay Black friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), laughing and making fun of the clumsiness of men having sex. Without being physically intimate, the two are very close, and their relationship has made it possible for Victor to tell the origin story of Agnes’s trauma in a vivid, compelling way.
Lydie (Naomi Ackie) is the friend Agnes (Eva Victor, back to camera, right) needs.
The “Bad Thing” happens in a white Victorian two-story in the old Massachusetts town where Agnes studies and teaches. We are not witness to it, nor is there a revealing
flashback. The camera, stationary, is positioned outside the house. We see Agnes arrive and, sometime later, leave, grabbing her boots as she hastily departs.
In one of the most powerful scenes in 2025 cinema, Agnes, back home and seated in the bathtub, describes for then-housemate Lydie what happened, in excruciating detail and with emotional depth. In another segment that confirms Victor’s extraordinary range and talent, Agnes is called for jury duty. The prosecuting attorney points out for the prospective jurors the difference between “corroborating” evidence and “circumstantial” evidence, a rational, literalist perspective—obviously analogous to the viewer’s knowledge of the Bad Thing—and one that contrasts sharply with Agnes’s thoughtful, halting, modulated, incomplete explication of the moment that changed her life.
Though not in any way a horror film, the screenplay is littered with "horror lite," including a single woman living alone in a rural house far from neighbors.
As one considers the film in retrospect, Agnes’s traumatic experience seems overdetermined, occupying every scene to the exclusion of all else—a fatal flaw, one would think. Her relationship with next-door neighborhood Gavin (Oscar-nominee Lucas Hedges [“Manchester by the Sea” 2016]), while sweet enough in some respects, is colored—indeed, charged—by the Bad Thing; Agnes is reduced to admiring Gavin’s torpid penis.
Three years after the event, a panic attack triggered by the confession of a jealous colleague (Kelly McCormack) finds Agnes pouring out her feelings, reliving the moment, to an impromptu road-side psychologist (John Carroll Lynch). An ordinary dinner party with friends degenerates into a quarrel about an insufficiently de-boned fish, perhaps with a play on the word “bone.” In the classroom, a self-confident, composed Agnes is rather improbably teaching Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, while Lydie’s reading of choice is James Baldwin’s gay classic, Giovanni’s Room. The screenplay is littered with “horror lite”: sounds in the night; Agnes, time and again, with her back to an open window and the darkness beyond; a front door primed to reveal the hulk of an assailant. Even the final scene (“Sorry, Baby” explained) is unnecessarily didactic, linked to the theme.
The film somehow manages to be something more than the sum of its reminders and replays of trauma.
The film somehow manages to be something more than the sum of its reminders and replays of trauma. What might otherwise come across as heavy-handed is relieved, or distanced, by humor. Agnes greets a physician’s formulaic response to her situation with, “I’ll remember that for the next time.” Her breathless effort to get lighter fluid at Gavin’s place has its own punchline—“we only have 2 hot dogs”—and concludes with Agnes sprinting back to her house—the wrong direction. The two women administrators who meet with Agnes after the “Bad Thing” are obvious clichés, as is Agnes’s fortuitous acquisition of a kitten (“Whatever you need,” responds Lydie). While not humorous, the classroom discussion of Lolita is redirected by the script’s effort to imply a link between Nabokov’s prose and the elaborate praise of Agnes’s thesis by her professor (Louis Cancelmi).
As a teacher, Agnes's (Victor) discussion of Nabokov's Lolita implies a link, as does almost everything in the script, to The Bad Thing.
“Sorry, Baby,” a small film nominated for 3 Cannes awards, is among several recent ones that find ways to present and at the same time to displace trauma: In “Sinners,” it’s via the zombies; in “The Life of Chuck,” it’s by leading with the worst that can happen. In “Sorry, Baby,” like “The Life of Chuck,” the disjuncture of chronology and moments of happiness keep the audience from a singular dispiriting focus.
The most important counterweight to the mono-theme is Victor’s ability to portray Agnes as a multi-dimensional persona, even while buried under the weight of PTSD. She finds men laughable and threatening yet retains the ability to distinguish one from another. Sex is problematic, but also satisfying and healing. Gavin isn’t quite right for her, but she needs him. And through it all, Victor’s Agnes can be serene, comforting, and even beguiling, only to vanish into the black hole of the Bad Thing. Quite a performance.
He says: It shouldn’t work, but it does.
She says: Victor is a talent to follow.
Date: 2025
Director: Eva Victor
Starring: Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, Louis Cancelmi, Kelly McCormack, John Carroll Lynch
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 103 minutes
Other Awards: 2 wins and 9 other nominations