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Eva Victor in ‘Sorry, Baby’; photo by Mia Cioffy Henry.

Multi-Hyphenate Eva Victor Makes Sundance Splash with ‘Sorry, Baby’

The American independent-film scene faces no shortage of questions. Coming off a year of drastically reduced production, the ongoing fallout of the 2023 writers’ strike and the aftermath of the disastrous California wildfires to an business climate held in limbo by various potential mergers and acquisitions, there are doubts about the financial viability of outside-the-box, sometimes demanding stories that are not comfortably minted from Hollywood studio IP farms.

Thankfully, the Sundance Film Festival, held annually since 1981 in Park City, Utah, still has the ability to help launch compelling new voices — even if its own future, beyond 2026, is a bit up in the air.

The Sundance Institute will soon make a decision on the festival’s 2027 venue, with Cincinnati, Ohio, and Boulder, Colorado, serving as host-city finalists, alongside a potential return to Park City and nearby Salt Lake City. However, this year’s iteration, held Jan. 23-Feb. 2, delivered a film that, if not magically solving all the macro problems, at least confirmed that smart, nuanced, artistically-inclined voices are continuing to put a personal stamp on cinema.

Eva Victor’s breakout Sorry, Baby landed as probably the most sharply defined auteur effort of the festival — a well-acted, highly watchable work, both funny and sad, that is perceptive about the ways in which we absorb hurt as well as how we often work to (we think) actively mask it from others.

Produced by Barry Jenkins, the movie was feted with Sundance’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and placed highly on numerous critics’ best-of-fest lists. No great surprise, then, that close on the heels of the festival’s conclusion the film was picked up for distribution by A24, which has had considerable success in credibly positioning both its movies and their makers as almost an arthouse sub-genre unto itself.

Starring Victor (who offscreen uses they/she pronouns), Sorry, Baby tells the story of Agnes, a college professor at a small New England liberal arts school which she had attended as a graduate student. Told in nonlinear fashion and grouped into five separate chapters, the film examines Agnes’ professional aspirations and deep friendship with Lydie (Naomi Ackie), and the changing nature and contour of these feelings as Agnes navigates a catastrophic blow to her identity and self-confidence, and Lydie announces that she’s pregnant and then eventually becomes a new mother. Along the way, the movie also unpacks Agnes’ health by way of a seemingly casual but nonetheless important relationship with neighbor Gavin (Lucas Hedges).

There’s a hand-in-glove aspect to Sorry, Baby’s component parts that speaks to the depth of Victor’s talents. So many movies addressing trauma, even if they don’t indulge actual depictions of devastating acts, portray people struggling with its aftereffects as either emotionally shattered and acting out, or walled-off and living in damaged isolation. Sorry, Baby eschews the diminished insights of such polarities.

It’s awash in ambivalence and confusion, and includes numerous scenes that can be read, legitimately, as both lightly amusing and also searing indictments of broken and failing systems.

Many actors, even if they avoid signposting emotion, broadly commit to a single tonal interpretation of a text. Victor doesn’t do that, instead delivering dialogue with a slightly flattened affect that provokes a certain curiosity and invites a viewer to more actively ponder and wrestle with the complexities of Agnes’ roiling inner landscapes.

The result is a somewhat off-kilter, quietly beguiling character, exuding both warmth and melancholy. Agnes is at ease and comfortable around Lydie, but otherwise not particularly attuned to or invested in other people’s social readings of her behavior.

Victor grew up in San Francisco, and went to college at Northwestern University, studying acting and playwriting. At a Sundance Cinema Café “Fresh Faces” panel alongside Ricky co-writer-director Rashad Frett, Bunnylovr writer-director-star Katarina Zhu, and Lurker actor Théodore Pellerin, Victor shared some of their path to such personal filmmaking.

“I was making comedy videos online and my producer was like, ‘What you’re doing is directing, you just don’t know it yet.’ And that sort of planted a seed in my head,” said the Sorry, Baby triple-threat.

After connecting with Jenkins on social media and receiving encouragement to submit long-form material, Victor hunkered down during COVID, retreating to Maine “with my cat and many cans of split pea soup,” and writing the script for what would become Sorry, Baby. After sending it to Pastel, Victor found a willing and supportive creative partner.

“As a first-time filmmaker you don’t necessarily know what you should be protective of. And so someone sort of teaching you what to be protective of is so, so helpful.”

Still, it took several more months for Victor to come to terms with the realization that they needed to direct and act in Sorry, Baby as well. “My film is about a time when I felt really out of control,” Victor said. “And I think everybody understood that the meta experience of being a director and having that kind of creative control was essential to this piece turning out the way it needed to, and having the experience be a positive one, and not re-traumatizing or something. So I was lucky that they were down to take the chance on it.”

Audiences interested in soulful, recognizably human character studies are lucky that, for the time being, there’s still the space for idiosyncratic bigscreen offerings.