Edinburgh International Film Festival 2025: Sorry, Baby

Writer and Director: Eva Victor

American writer-director Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby has been a critical darling since its world premiere at Sundance, later screened at Directors’ Fortnight at this year’s Cannes. Opening the 78th Edinburgh International Film Festival, it arrived with high expectations.

Drawing on Victor’s own experiences, the film follows the aftermath of its protagonist Agnes, played by Victor themselves, a promising creative writing student at a small New England college, after something very bad happens to her. Told in a non-linear structure, the narrative shifts between Agnes’s present-day life as a literature professor at her alma mater, where she reconnects with her college friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie), and the years following the traumatic event.

Victor’s debut is a well-crafted reminder that, despite the institutional and societal shifts prompted by the MeToo movement, change is not a miracle cure that erases trauma once and for all. Standardised practices and policy reforms do not equal a society where such harm will never recur or where wounds can be easily healed. In fact, we still do not know how to mend these injuries, which linger far longer than many would like to admit. 

Much praise has been given to Victor’s choice not to depict the traumatic incident directly, instead showing only the outside of the house as time passes and night falls. Yet this restraint feels undermined when, later, the film inserts a brief imagined sequence in which Agnes’s classmate Natasha (Kelly McCormack), a weaker student in class, is shown in bed with the same professor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi), who was involved in Agnes’s trauma. This fantasy triggers a panic attack, leading to a roadside conversation with Pete (John Carroll Lynch), a kind sandwich shop owner. One of those unmistakably “Sundance” exchanges, it underscores that the imaginary is not a throwaway device but a crucial element in the narrative.

Victor undoubtedly handles Agnes with care. She is witty, deadpan, steeped in literature, and surrounded by complicated dynamics: her rivalry with Natasha, her semi-romantic relationship with Gavin (Lucas Hedges), her encounters with Decker, and her short but grounding bond with Pete. Yet while the film protects Agnes, many of the characters around her feel flattened into comic foils. Natasha is painted as simple-minded and still jealous years after graduation. Numerous side characters are treated this way, administrative staff at the disciplinary board, hospital doctors, Lydia’s partner Fran (E.R. Fightmaster), even a male student horrified by Lolita in class, yet all are reduced to caricatures, serving jokes or illustrating clever ‘points’ the film wants to make, rather than existing as full people.

This choice may underline the film’s central observation: that in the aftermath of trauma, life continues for everyone else, often with absurdity, indifference, or even hostility. But it also means the characters often function more as symbolic placeholders, reinforcing the film’s darkly comic tone rather than inhabiting a recognisable world. The deadpan humour is sharp, the details pointed, and the commentary timely. Yet at times the effect risks feeling less like lived experience and more like a patchwork of observations stitched together to signal meaning. Perhaps that is intentional, capturing the disorienting nature of trauma itself, where the world appears hostile and fractured even if this is ultimately a subjective perception.

In the end, Sorry, Baby is a debut feature that provokes, unsettles, and leaves a mark, even when its pieces don’t fully cohere.

Sorry, Baby is screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.