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For their acclaimed debut, Sorry, Baby, comedian and actor Eva Victor is the writer, director and star of a film about trauma that is both deeply moving and funny. By Andy Hazel.

Filmmaker Eva Victor tackles the ‘hard things’ in Sorry, Baby

Filmmaker Eva Victor.

Credit: Lee Dubin

A woman sits alone in her car in a parking lot in a small New England town, locked in a panic attack. Frozen and hyperventilating, she is noticed by a gruffly paternal shop owner. He calms her down and they fall into a halting conversation. Without elaborating, she tells him that “something pretty bad” happened three years ago.

The man doesn’t pry. Instead, he makes her a sandwich. “Three years is not that much time,” he says gently. “It’s a lot of time, but it’s not that much time.”

That simple and paradoxical line holds the shape of Sorry, Baby, a sharply humorous film about trauma that rewrites the traditional narrative of victimhood and catharsis. Since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January sparked a bidding war among distributors, Sorry, Baby has remained one of the year’s most critically acclaimed films. It will be in Australian cinemas from this week.

The woman behind the wheel, both on screen and behind the camera, is Eva Victor. If the face of the 31-year-old New Yorker looks familiar, it might be because you’ve seen it in meme-length viral videos or in their recurring role in the television series Billions. If you recognise their name it may be because you once shared a Reductress article such as “ ‘I Want Children Someday,’ Says Man Who Will At Best Stand There Saying, ‘Push Babe’ ”, “ ‘I’m Feeling Good These Days,’ Says Woman Who Clearly Does Not Get NYTimes Notifications” or “Bowler Hats to Wear If You’re As Out of Touch as Diane Keaton”.

“When I wrote those stories, I was 23, 24,” Victor says. “It was my first job in the field I wanted to work in, and at the time Reductress was fun to write jokes for with this catty, sarcastic voice. I learnt a lot about how to use humour to point at people who are being unjust to other people.

“I also learnt to ask, ‘how do you make a joke that makes you laugh at the right person and not at someone who’s being victimised?’ That was very helpful in feeling comfortable talking about hard things with Sorry, Baby. But once in a while someone will read me a headline that I wrote and I’m, like, ‘I seriously don’t stand by that.’ But that’s okay.” They laugh. “Life is like that. We’re allowed to grow, even if the internet doesn’t.”

For Victor, growth meant moving from sketch absurdism to something more individual and deeper. On social media, they created videos in which they became a keen satirist of the bright absurdities of femininity and performance, playing, for example, a glamorous wife who “def did not murder my husband” and a woman thrilled to join Boston’s infamous “Straight Pride” parade. “We have 364 days a year when we have unbelievable, unspoken privilege,” she declares in mock sincerity. “Then we have one day a year – one day – where we get to celebrate having that privilege all year round. What doesn’t make sense to you?”

One fan of these videos was Barry Jenkins, director of the films Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk. Jenkins and his partners at production company Pastel were in the process of helping Charlotte Wells make her first feature film, Aftersun, but he found time to send Victor a message on Instagram. If you ever want to write a film, Jenkins said, let me know.

During the first shock of the pandemic, with production on Billions paused, Victor, unsure of what would come next, sublet a friend’s house in Maine and set about writing Sorry, Baby.

“I wrote a pilot, and a lot of things privately,” they say. “I know I wanted to talk about my experience of trauma, and then I knew I wanted it to be funny and also serious at the same time. I’ve seen a lot of films about traumatic things happening to people, but I’d never seen one that was about that state of confusion afterwards. That part where you can’t quite believe it happened and you’re just floating, separated from your body in this weird way. Once I figured out how to structure it, I was able to write it and create the right sort of that tone.”

That tone, at once direct and elusive, has already sparked long paragraphs from admiring film critics. Victor’s film follows Agnes, a mordant English tutor who is living in the same house she lived in as a student and teaching at the same liberal arts college she studied at, in the wintry forests of Maine. In the film’s opening scene Agnes is visited by her friend Lydie, played by Naomi Ackie, and the two slip into an easy open friendship, yet we get the feeling Agnes is stuck. The viewer never sees the traumatic event take place. What matters isn’t what happened, Victor says, but how Agnes lives with it.

That the film is broken into five chapters feels appropriate for a central character who wrote their thesis on the art of the short story. Similarly, Agnes’s world is filled with literary references and allusions. “All the books in the film are very deliberately placed,” Victor explains. “I wanted the film to celebrate that experience of being young and finding a book that just blows your mind.”

In one scene, Agnes leads a discussion of Nabokov’s Lolita. She is confident, even playful, until a student interrupts to say he finds the novel “really disgusting”.

“Well, Jeremy, there’s a world in which that’s a relief to hear,” says Agnes. “How did you find the writing itself?”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Jeremy continues. “I felt really pissed off because I really hated the stuff happening, but I really liked the sort of stuff he was saying.”

Lolita was essential to developing both the story of the film and the character of Agnes, Victor explains. “The reading I included in the film is the part where Humbert, the narrator, has a moment when the interiority of Lolita flashes in his mind and he realises she is a whole person and that maybe he’s been doing this horrible thing but then quickly walks away from that idea. I thought that Agnes would be interested in teaching that. Teaching how two things can be true at once.”

When Jenkins read Victor’s script, he was immediately on board. As they hadn’t directed before, he dispatched them into a year-long filmmaking bootcamp that included reading lists, editing and cinematography tutorials and workshops that Victor later realised were tests. Just as crucial was their time shadowing writer-director Jane Schoenbrun on the production of their critically and commercially successful 2024 film I Saw the TV Glow before Pastel signed on to back Victor’s own 24-day shoot in the historic town of Ipswich, Massachusetts.

“It’s a really small film,” Victor says. “So anyone who was there was there because the script meant something to them. It was a kind of self-selected group of people who had a very special reason to be there and I could really feel that.”

Theorists describe trauma as what happens when experience is not fully integrated into autobiographical memory. Instead of being filed away as the past, the memory lingers in a sensory, present-tense state. As Peter A. Levine writes in his book Trauma and Memory, therapy works by linking these troubling “procedural memories” with the emotional, episodic and narrative functions of memory. “This allows the memory to take its rightful place where it belongs,” Levine writes, “in the past.”

“For me, I think there’s something very, very meaningful talking about an experience where someone has completely taken control of your body,” Victor says slowly. “That’s a very surreal thing. It makes you realise that all the rules the world has thrust upon you, what is allowed, are just things people say. People can break the rules.

“To direct myself as an actor, I got to choose where my body went. Then, once I decided that this whole team of lovely people were supporting my decisions on a technical level, like ‘we’re lighting for that spot where you want to stand’ and ‘we are making sure your words can be heard’, there’s this very meta experience of support. To be talking about an experience that’s so lonely and that makes you feel so unsupported, it was very meaningful to then be in a position of leading.”

In one scene that takes place in a courtroom, Agnes debates whether being the victim of a crime would make her biased as a juror. When she argues that she is already performing a civic duty by being a teacher, the judge counters, “Some would say a teacher makes for an ideal juror”, before he reads over her papers. “It says here on your questionnaire, ‘How would your friends describe you?’ You wrote ‘smart’, crossed that word out and wrote the word ‘tall’.”

Victor smiles wryly and admits they are still learning about tone. “You don’t just wake up one day and it all fits together. For this movie, it was about holding the audience’s hand through the shifts – but I don’t really think of them as shifts. It’s not like one scene is serious and the next is funny. It’s more like one scene moves through different energy, some moments are funny, some more delicate. That feels closer to what it’s like to heal, trying to make sense of the world.

“That shifting was in the script, but as we shot we had to keep calibrating so the performances fit within the same film. The edit was where most of the work happened. We’d say, ‘this scene needs more energy’ or ‘this one should sit still a little longer’. It was a long process of small adjustments, like sewing something seamless.”

In the history of films, the writer-director-star combination is rare, and rarer still for a first-time filmmaker who identifies as she/they. “I do understand why people don’t direct and act in their films,” Victor says. “It’s lonelier. It’s nice to have a cast and it’s nice to have a little group on the road, because it is a lot to hold alone. My words, though I choose them carefully, are also inevitably going to pale in comparison to what I tried to say in the film, which was so thoroughly thought out by me for years and years.”

That sense of loneliness continues into release. While they’ve seen the film about 70-80 times during the editing process, Victor says they are still coming to terms with what the film means to other people and understanding the impact it is having.

“While I was writing, all I wanted to do was just share my story with the world, and now that I get to do it, there’s a very ironic feeling of nostalgia for the time I was writing. I’m excited to go back into my cave all by myself and figure out what the hell I want to say.

“I do think this has spoilt me a bit because I got to do everything, I got to really make something the way I wanted to, and it doesn’t make sense to do something that feels less exciting than that.”

Victor smiles in a way that suggests they’re still finding the idea of talking about their film with someone in Australia an odd experience. “It still feels incredible that this film exists,” they say. “Making this film has felt like pulling off the heist of the century.”

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