The Contours of Trauma

In their acerbic feature debut “Sorry, Baby,” multi-hyphenate Eva Victor employs episodic vignettes to craft a fragmented retrospective on sexual assault, yielding one of the best and most powerful films of 2025. The independent comedy-drama — produced by Barry Jenkins and purchased by A24 after its award-winning Sundance bow — tackles uncomfortable material with self-effacing humor, confident wit and a compassionate cinematic eye for how the body keeps the score.

Victor captures all this through gallows humor, wielding a photographic remove that gradually gives way to piercing intimacy and, eventually, to unexpected comfort. In addition to writing and directing the film, they also play rural northeastern college professor Agnes, a lanky, jovial, amusingly awkward woman who welcomes her former grad school roommate Lydie (Naomi Ackie) for a weekend visit. The pair’s conversational catch-up welcomes us into their lively personal history, all within the safe confines of Agnes’ cabin near campus grounds. However, a dinner with their former study group yields sudden tonal whiplash, when former mentor Decker (Louis Cancelmi) comes up in conversation. Agnes’ eyes glaze over, offering hints of a painful history. Something unpleasant clearly transpired between Agnes and Decker, a secret the film unveils across numerous frigid flashbacks, each with its own chapter title.

When “Sorry, Baby” rewinds to four years prior — to a time when Agnes’ only worry was her thesis on short-form literature — this lengthy prologue makes for a remarkable framing device, imbuing seemingly trivial events with unnerving significance.

While peering back at us from the past, “Sorry, Baby” leaves us helpless to intervene. Foreknowledge of what’s to come forces us to wait with bated breath for dramatic pieces to fall in place, usually with excruciating impact. When Agnes is invited to Decker’s home to discuss her paper, a dark cloud looms over this casual meeting, but Victor doesn’t film Agnes’ assault. Instead, their camera waits patiently outside Decker’s cottage in a wide shot, rendering us powerless observers, while reflecting Agnes’ own out-of-body response. Afternoon cuts harshly to dusk, and then to nightfall, as she finally leaves in a hurry, boots in hand, her minuscule figure eclipsed by Decker’s home. Victor trusts that we’ll understand what transpired, implying violent events without the need to make their images violent as well. Their filmmaking is reserved and appropriately distant, but it ensures we feel each discomforting development deep in our bones.

The lucid flashback structure makes intuiting the long-term effects of this betrayal an active part of the viewing experience. Victor accompanies charged moments of memory with minor distortions, reflecting the imperfect nature of recollection. In the immediate aftermath of the assault, it seems like someone calls out to a nauseated Agnes from off-screen. However, we never actually see this person, and their voice is mixed into the soundtrack as though it were a digital hallucination, a ghost in the machine. As Victor re-creates the sensation of recalling a foggy moment, we too become untethered.

This uncertainty permeates even the movie’s more straightforward, sure-footed scenes — including those set prior to the assault. When Agnes meets with Decker in his university office, the screenplay’s retrospective structure forces us to read deeper meaning into each text message and verbal exchange, the same way a survivor might when recalling the details of their relationship to their assailant, guiltily searching for clues they believe they ought to have seen.

There’s a subtle difference in how Agnes and Decker are shot during this simple meeting. Victor and cinematographer Mia Cioffi Henry capture Agnes with a colder and often hazier palette than Decker, whose close-ups are more vivid and warm, as though Agnes were reflecting on these events from a future vantage in order to pick them apart. She views Decker with far more clarity than she sees her past self, as if unable to afford herself any grace or benefit of doubt. At times, it even looks like the younger Agnes has the same weary, glazed-over expression she would go on to wear at the dinner party years later, as though Victor — through their hints of on-screen vulnerability — were bracing for some inevitable impact. There is, of course, no way for Agnes to see the future. But as depictions of memory, these early scenes are injected with a tragic irony, suggesting that Agnes might, on some subconscious level, think she deserved what happened, as she reflects on her past.

To capture the enormous shift in perspective before and after her assault, the camera falls on spaces glimpsed in the movie’s future-set prologue, such as familiar doors and hallways. Their texture and appearance remain the same from “then” to “now,” but the more the frame lingers in silence, the more “Sorry, Baby” urges us to meditate on Agnes’ relationship to each location and surface. Physically, nothing has changed. Emotionally, everything has.

While tracing these changes, “Sorry, Baby” never shies away from the sheer absurdity of living with the trauma of sexual assault in a world that isn’t equipped to help. Victor, who found notable success through comedy shorts online, spends significant time on the farcical procedures that often follow such incidents in academic settings, from the sanitized demeanor of medical personnel, to the red tape of official bureaucracy. As poignant as the film can be, it’s piercingly funny too. Agnes’ assault may be central to the story, but every ludicrous encounter from there on out helps shape the contours of her trauma.

And yet, despite taking potshots at each supporting character, Victor avoids the temptation of prescriptive, morally binary storytelling, given how complicated Agnes’ feelings remain toward the incident, toward Decker and toward a fraught period in her life. The very act of pointing a camera at a traumatic experience and tracking how Agnes processes it over months and years becomes a living document of difficult emotional transition and the different ways of processing sexual violence. For Agnes, this includes having bland, uninteresting but ultimately safe sex with her hopeless romantic neighbor Gavin (Lucas Hedges) — a sweet and funny subplot.

There’s no such thing as a perfect victim. Agnes’ imperfection is an inability to find the right language to describe what transpired. From the moment she relays her assault to Lydie — whose affirming response helps her accept its reality — right up until she’s forced to describe it in a legal setting years later, Agnes dances around any and all harsh terminology, referring to being raped simply as “the bad thing,” like a specter haunting her from afar. Through Victor’s fragile performance, you get the sense that Agnes will shatter if she puts words to what transpired, though this allows her and Lydie to create a gentle shared language around the event — one they share with the audience too, creating a welcoming space to safely confront what happened.

But even these walls can crack in unpredictable ways. It takes several years — and a conversation about an adjacent subject — for Agnes to finally experience an outburst. This takes the form of a panic attack, performed by Victor with devastating realism. Ironically, Agnes can only be calmed by a gruff but benevolent stranger (John Carroll Lynch) who similarly dances around the specifics, as though she had been searching for someone on her exact, idiosyncratic wavelength.

For viewers who may be processing their own pain and isolation, “Sorry, Baby” will likely fulfill the same function as Lynch’s kindly character. It’s a zany and unexpected comfort. This is owed to the naturalism captured within its wildly shifting tones. It features all the thrashing ups and downs, the disorienting highs and lows and all the anguish and comic absurdity of life itself, wrapped in cinematic gut-punch that, paradoxically, feels like a gentle embrace.