Eva Victor‘s feature directing debut “Sorry, Baby” — which the filmmaker also wrote and stars in — was the jewel of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. A24 bought the film before the festival’s end, where this poignant and incisive look at an academic recovering from trauma won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award out of the U.S. Dramatic Competition. “Sorry, Baby” will hit U.S. theaters on June 27 from A24 after opening the Seattle International Film Festival for one last festival bow. The film will also close this year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, the sidebar that regularly honors boundary-pushing filmmakers. Watch the trailer below.
A24’s logline for “Sorry, Baby” is curiously mute on details — “Something bad happened to Agnes. But life goes on… for everyone around her, at least” — but IndieWire saw the film at Sundance and can confirm it takes a hard and unusual cinematic look at a woman reeling from a terrible encounter from her mentor. Victor, a comedian and social media star, makes a bold statement with her first film, both darkly funny and poignant. She co-stars alongside Naomi Ackie and Lucas Hedges as Agnes, who has stayed behind in the New England cottage town where she completed grad school, here still to try and make it as a writer. A fraught encounter with her thesis advisor (Louis Cancelmi) has left her scrambling for answers, as the movie charts her belated coming-of-age against the backdrop of one terrible event.
More from IndieWire’s rave review: “Something bad happened to Agnes. But life goes on. Big, wonderful, funny, horrible, strange, sad, great life. How lucky we are that Victor is here to chronicle just that.”
Victor spoke to IndieWire at our Sundance Studio about how telling this very personal story became a kind of “therapy”: “It was definitely in a lot of ways an attempt to put myself through some sort of therapy, it’s a story about healing, and in some meta ways, writing was an attempt at that, making it was an attempt at that. The film is about this serious thing in some ways but it’s about the time afterwards and a friendship that gets you through that. A lot of the film is about trying to find joy, and that’s what our characters are doing together in the film.”
“Sorry, Baby” finds uncomfortable humor in the darkest of times. Oscar winner Barry Jenkins produced the movie along with Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak. John Carroll Lynch co-stars as a stranger who helps Agnes out in the worst of times.
Watch the trailer for “Sorry, Baby” below.
