Since picking up the Waldo Salt Award for Screenwriting award in Park City, the film made a splash as SIFF’s Closing Night Gala, where it won the Seattle Critics Award. With it’s returns to SIFF Uptown for a theatrical run starting tonight, we’re republishing a revised review from its Sundance premiere below.

Sorry, Baby (2024 | USA | 103 minutes | Eva Victor)

Occasionally high-altitude festival buzz is right: Eva Victor’s Sorry Baby was definitely the film to see at Sundance. As producers, Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski basically never miss.

Spanning several nonlinear chapters in the life of a people-pleasing college English professor, Eva Victor’s wondrously delicate and wry debut feature is an incisive exploration of the ways that trauma ripples through a life and the slow ways it heals (and sometimes doesn’t). Set in a small college town on the rocky New England coast, we first meet Agnes (Victor) as her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie, recently a standout in Mickey 17) arrives for a long-overdue visit to the house they once shared as graduate students. The bond of their friendship, forged through cohabitation and the shared stresses of churning out theses, is instantly evident. They speak with a familiar shorthand of references — and omissions — that speaks volumes.

The weekend proceeds with gleeful reunions, revelations of exciting life developments, revisitations of old haunts, and an awkward dinners with former friends (and frenemies) from their graduate class. Always at the periphery of their tightly bonded friendship, though, are hints of a painful violation that shattered Agnes’s personal and academic life. As an audience, we can easily imagine how the pieces might fit together into an awful event, but Victor instead allows the story to reveals itself in measured flashbacks that bring us first back to their student days and then through meaningful jumps spanning several formative years in Agnes’s life.

Subsequent chapters reveal the whole story, with each candid vignette unfolding with a soft touch and gentle humor. Rather than depict the core incident in detail, the camera is kept at a distance in a sort of protective shield for both the characters and audience alike. Working as writer, director, and star in her debut feature, Victor instead puts the focus on focusing instead on both the immediate and long-lingering effects of a mentor’s betrayal and the rocky road to recovery. The structure gives characters the agency to divulge, disclose, and process on their own terms.

Through each hop through time, we follow Agnes’s recovery as she experiences the unexpectedly transformational powers of the cuddly creatures found along the way, be it dear friends, a surprisingly sensitive sandwich vendor (a phenomenal cameo from John Carroll Lynch), an adorable abandoned kitten, or a sweet neighbor played by Lucas Hedges. Quietly revelatory, touching and funny in equal measure, the story’s culmination finds Agnes briefly breaking from her usual dry self-deprecation to deliver one of the great closing monologues of the year.

Sorry, Baby played as an official selection of the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It opens in Seattle at SIFF Uptown on July 10th.

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