Sorry, Baby (2025)

That’s Life, Bad Things Happen

Eva Victor’s first feature film, which she wrote, directed, and starred in, premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. After studying acting and screenwriting, Victor started her career as a writer at a feminist parody news site. Although she continued with acting, humor always remained an essential part of her life through the short videos she produced. It is therefore not surprising that in her first feature she manages to dilute such a heavy and complex subject with humor. What is surprising, however, is her command of visual language and the depth of her script, making her debut a strikingly bright beginning.

Humor has a power in dealing with difficult subjects that far surpasses sternness. With humor, an area of discomfort opens up for the audience, and it becomes easier to look at what disturbs us while laughing. Since the film has other distinguishing features that stand out more than its humor, it is best to leave humor aside for a moment—as a breeze that occasionally airs the room—and move on to those features.

The First Shot Is the Film in One Shot

Sorry Baby opens with the sound of a woman’s hum accompanied by piano, and an isolated house in the middle of a dark forest. As yellow, warm light seeps through the windows, the viewer looking at it in wide shot inevitably asks: Who lives in that house?

The first answer could be a large family, numerous enough to fill every room. The other possibility: a lonely person, afraid of the dark. The forest is dense, the trees towering high—who would want to live in such a house alone?

This opening is one of many shots in which Eva Victor plants aesthetic choices and hidden meanings. Yet, because it is the first, it feels especially significant. Editor Alex O’Flinn once said: “First shot of your film is your film in just one shot.” This perfectly captures the essence here. Many creative directors or writers are known to start their works with an image. Victor connects her protagonist Agnes with this lonely house in the dark woods, as if saying: If I had to condense my film into a single shot, it would be this house. Throughout the film, houses will repeatedly serve as metaphors for characters and events.

At this point, we might recall Magritte’s Empire of Light series. By combining daylight sky and nighttime darkness in a single frame, Magritte places the viewer in a temporal and emotional paradox. The bright blue sky above sits uneasily with the dim, lamp-lit street below. The juxtaposition is neither entirely reassuring nor wholly menacing; it is a calm yet tense coexistence. Magritte never explains this contradiction, leaving it to unfold in the viewer’s mind. Meaning lives within these gaps.

Sorry Baby employs a similar method in cinema. Its visual language—particularly the placement of light and color, and the camera’s deliberate distance—keeps the audience away from the core of events. Meaning develops not in what is shown, but in the negative space.

Agnes’s house is the first major visual sign in the film. The interior glows warmly in soft tones, while the outside is cold and dim. The contrast recalls Magritte’s sky-ground tension: simultaneously inviting and alienating. The house seems a refuge for Agnes, but the camera and lighting suggest it is not entirely safe. The tension between warmth and framing produces a dual emotional tone.

Like Magritte’s paradoxes, Sorry Baby locates meaning in ambiguity. In both cases, the viewer is not invited into the center but kept at a distance, asked to produce meaning themselves. The goal is not to lock in a single emotion but to create a surface where contradictions can coexist. In that space between what is seen and unseen, perhaps one comes closest to truth.

The unease hinted at in the opening dissolves when headlights of an approaching car pierce the scene. Agnes, who lives alone and has fused with her house, has a visitor: her lifelong friend Lydia.

Though Victor’s short videos already hinted at her potential as a director, her visual command in this film is strikingly advanced. Her visual metaphors with houses extend beyond architecture, becoming re-creations of the same shot at different times and with different people. The familiarity of certain angles and settings, which make the viewer think I’ve seen this shot before, enhances the film’s visual strength. Just as humor lightens the weight of walking barefoot across shards of glass, visual language becomes an uplifting force.

Agnes and Lydia

The film unfolds in chapters. The first centers on Agnes (played by Victor) and her closest friend Lydia. They speak breathlessly, as though making up for long separation, and all seems well. A late-night interruption by their neighbor Gavin suggests Agnes isn’t as isolated as her house implies. But is she really not alone?

The first sign of unease comes when Lydia finds a copy of Lolita with a bookmark inside. Reading a passage unsettles her, foreshadowing what we will later discover—clues of Agnes’s past. Another such clue comes when the camera shows the two women sleeping in bed from outside a window, its glass covered with manuscript pages. Why are those papers pasted on the window? The answer comes later.

Agnes’s bedroom window covered with thesis pages is perhaps the film’s clearest gesture of “framing/borders.” A window, normally a permeable surface, here asserts itself as a barrier. The papers become both physical and symbolic boundaries, separating Agnes’s post-thesis life from the outside world.

For now, the real story sleeps, and the first chapter glows in the warm colors of friendship.

At a dinner with old college friends, we encounter the clearest hint of Agnes’s hidden trauma. The dining table—cinema’s classic arena of human dynamics—becomes a stage for cruelty. Surrounded by artificial flowers, Agnes sits isolated and silent, nearly breaking into panic under a friend’s verbal jabs. Lydia’s supportive hand under the table keeps her grounded. Still, the audience must wait to uncover Agnes’s secret.

To the Lighthouse

After opening with friendship, the film moves toward Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Just as Lolita hinted at past trauma, here Woolf’s novel provides the structural and thematic framework.

Woolf’s book is divided into three parts: The Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse. Written in stream-of-consciousness, it is nonlinear, exploring change, impermanence, and the distance between dream and reality.

So too Sorry Baby flows in a nonlinear sequence—essentially a 2-1-3 order. We first meet post-trauma Agnes, then see her before the rupture, and finally glimpse her future self. The key events remain partially hidden, glimpsed obliquely—like Woolf’s elisions.

Both works ask: how can one reconstruct life after loss or trauma? The point is not to restore the past but to build anew. Life will never return to what it was—bad things happen, after all—but another form of existence remains possible. For Agnes, healing comes not only through her bond with Lydia but also in the small kindness of strangers.

Houses and Memory

Victor repeatedly uses houses as symbols of selfhood, safety, and rupture. Agnes cocoons herself in her house, reflecting her alienation from her own body. Later, we watch in time-lapse from outside the professor’s house where the traumatic event occurs. As day turns to night, the audience, like a voyeur, knows something is wrong inside without ever seeing it directly.

Like Magritte’s unseen line between day and night, the film denies us the central moment, making meaning grow in absence.

The Unseen

The film’s power lies partly in its unseen elements—doors unopened, spaces hidden, images withheld. From the paper-covered window to the off-screen lighthouse, meaning emerges from absence.

Law, Society, and Rape

The film’s rupture stems from rape, though it could have been any traumatic event. Yet by choosing rape, Victor raises sharp questions. We never witness the assault—only Agnes’s later account. This aligns with reality, where most sexual assaults lack witnesses and must be judged on testimony and evidence.

The film asks: can rape be accidental? Would a jury find mitigating circumstances if the professor testified? Would his status as a father matter? These unsettling questions mirror legal and social ambiguities.

Victor also critiques bureaucratic absurdity. The doctor’s remark—“You shouldn’t have showered afterward”—and Agnes’s sarcastic reply—“Fine, next time I’m raped I won’t shower”—highlight how forensic procedure can feel grotesquely out of touch with victims’ realities. Likewise, two female administrators dismiss the issue by saying, “We are women,” exposing the insufficiency of gender solidarity alone.

Conclusion

With her debut, Eva Victor masterfully combines nonlinear storytelling and a strong visual language to explore trauma, friendship, healing, and the transformative power of time. She does not shy away from asking disturbing questions, but does so with subtle humor and carefully chosen imagery rather than heavy solemnity.

Agnes’s story becomes one of rebuilding—finding ways to live with broken pieces. Through visual echoes, temporal repetitions, and thematic parallels, the film develops a rhythm that lingers in memory. More than a debut, Sorry Baby feels like a strong preview of Eva Victor’s cinematic identity.

Zeynep Bakanoğlu & Nil Birinci