Eva Victor made funny viral videos. They led to a funny film about trauma.

Washington Post

11-07-2025

Eva Victor stood still, drenched and disappointed.
It was spring 2024. The filmmaker, who uses they/she pronouns, had been shooting their directorial debut, 'Sorry, Baby,' in the coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, when they received a text from their mother informing them of an ancestor named Lydia buried in a graveyard nearby. Victor carved out a break in the tight 24-day shoot to search for the grave, hoping for some meaningful revelation, but instead found themself standing in a cemetery amid a torrential downpour, without a single 'Lydia' marker in sight.
'I was like, 'Okay, this is insane,'' Victor, 31, recalled in a May interview at the Ritz-Carlton Georgetown. And yet, it also felt so in character.
The real-life scene seemed exactly like the sort of situation Victor's 'Sorry, Baby' protagonist, Agnes, would wind up in. The film, which just opened in D.C., is darkly funny and extraordinarily compassionate as it follows Agnes in the aftermath of being sexually assaulted — something that also happened to Victor, who wrote the screenplay. The story unfolds nonlinearly and delicately conveys Agnes's devastation. There are no theatrics. Any emotional change is gradual. For the most part, Agnes keeps still while life continues to whirl around her.
'I wanted to speak to the experience of stuckness, and what it feels like when the world is moving at a faster pace than you,' Victor said.
If anyone can bring out Agnes's sense of humor amid the doldrums, it's her best friend — who just happens to be named Lydia. The character, played by Naomi Ackie ('Blink Twice,' 'Mickey 17'), already bore the name by the time Victor received their mom's text about the ancestor. 'I was like, 'Okay, there's something at play here,'' Victor said. Maybe the fictional Lydia would play a role in their life that the real one could not.
Because as much as 'Sorry, Baby' is about the destabilizing effects of assault, it is also about how support from chosen family can help you heal. The film takes place throughout a five-year period, during which Lydia — nicknamed Lydie — visits Agnes at the house they lived in together while attending graduate school. While Agnes remains isolated in the small New England college town, sticking around after graduation to serve as an adjunct professor in the English department, Lydie moves away, gets married and has a child. The growing contrast in their circumstances highlights how difficult Agnes finds it to move on from 'something pretty bad,' as she refers to the assault a few years later.
'How complicated is that, when you know your friend is … in an arrested development because of trauma?' Ackie said over the phone. 'And yet there's still this deep love and appreciation for each other, having seen each other grow up in such an integral time of your lives.'
Early in the pandemic, Victor received a direct message from the Oscar-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins ('Moonlight'). He was a fan of their viral comedy videos — such as the tongue-in-cheek 'me explaining to my boyfriend why we're going to straight pride,' posted to Twitter in 2019 — and told them to reach out to his production company, Pastel, if they ever wanted to work on something together.
That timing felt like fate, as Victor had been trying for a while to write about their experience healing from trauma. While other producers tended to approach them with comedic projects in mind, hearing from Jenkins, who largely works in drama, encouraged their tonal pivot. Victor wrote 'Sorry, Baby' while holed away in a Maine cabin that winter and sent a copy of the screenplay over to Pastel in early 2021.
Adele Romanski, Jenkins's producing partner, was struck by how 'fully realized' the script was when it arrived to Pastel, she said. The producers met with Victor and immediately asked: 'How do you see yourself participating in it? Are you acting in it? Are you directing it?' Victor wanted to perform — beyond the comedy videos, they began appearing in the Showtime series 'Billions' in 2020 — but directing would be a new frontier. The Pastel team assured Victor that they could do it, Romanski said, as directorial choices were being made in the videos posted online.
'We've done a lot of debuts,' Romanski added. Working with a first-time filmmaker is 'a risk that can have the greatest reward.'
In January, 'Sorry, Baby' premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to strong reviews. Vanity Fair described the film as an 'auspicious debut,' while Variety praised the writing as 'warm and compassionate.' Writing in IndieWire, Kate Erbland commended the decision to center healing over violence, noting that Victor 'is a wise enough creator to understand that's only part of the story, because that's only part of life itself.'
The film does not depict Agnes being assaulted and — because of the nonlinear time structure — only makes clear what happened to her about halfway through. The audience learns the cause of the character's stunted emotion when she comes home visibly shaken after meeting with her thesis adviser (Louis Cancelmi) and tells Lydie about how he forced himself upon her. Agnes sits upright in a bathtub as she haltingly narrates the night's events to Lydie, who validates that what Agnes experienced was rape.
'That's what the film is about,' Victor said. 'It's about someone being there to listen and hold [you] in the aftermath of something bad. The middle of the film isn't violence; it's [Agnes] in the bathtub telling her friend about what happened, and her friend listening really well and responding. Their friendship is the most important relationship in the film, so I wanted to put that first.'
Victor shies away from discussing the specifics of what happened to them in real life. Interviews can be tough for the filmmaker, they said, as almost everything they have to say is already in the movie — even if it's fictionalized. While Victor never attended graduate school, a frustrating meeting between Agnes and two members of the HR department allows them to comment on how these institutions have historically failed sexual assault survivors. Victor doubles down on their criticism of systemic failures in a scene set the morning after Agnes is assaulted, when she faces a hostile line of questioning from a male doctor who criticizes her for waiting to come to the hospital.
'This string of institutional failures was always a part of the film,' Victor said. Agnes chooses to remain at the school — and even ends up working in the office previously occupied by her rapist — because 'she's like, 'No, I deserve to stay here, even if I'm in this office that feels like it's haunted by the ghost of what used to be here.'' She attempts to reclaim the space. Victor found it therapeutic to revisit their past while directing 'Sorry, Baby.' Being in charge of the set meant they could recover a sense of control that was once taken away from them.
'The experience of this kind of trauma is sort of all about someone deciding where your body goes,' they said. 'Being able to be like, 'No, this is where my body goes. I am leading this whole thing. I decide if this is where I go,' is a very special experience.'
Given its subject matter and dreary aesthetic — Victor drew visual inspiration from Kelly Reichardt's mellow drama 'Certain Women' and Kenneth Lonergan's ultra-depressing 'Manchester by the Sea' — it might surprise audiences how funny 'Sorry, Baby' can be. Ackie's favorite scene to shoot occurs at the start of the film, when the roommates lounge on their living room couch, trading outlandish jokes about the ways men behave when they're having sex. 'That took us a long time to do,' Ackie said. 'There are so many takes where we are literally laughing out of control. We were trying so many different things … but finally found the right pitch.'
Victor paid extra attention to tone while editing the film, making sure Agnes's gallows humor was sensitive enough to exist alongside some of the more serious material. There are carefully calibrated laughs throughout. Each interaction Agnes shares with her awkward neighbor and sometimes-lover, Gavin (Lucas Hedges, of 'Manchester by the Sea' and 'Lady Bird'), for instance, plays as cringe comedy. A scene where Agnes is summoned to jury duty for an assault case but can't decide whether to disclose her potential bias toes the line between drama and comedy: It highlights how even the most mundane situations can be triggering for an assault victim, while depicting her indecision with the absurdity of a single-camera sitcom.
'The tone, it's really a tightrope in every moment,' Victor said. They were nervous to witness 'Sorry, Baby' premiere at Sundance, as the festival marked the first time the film screened for a crowd of more than 30 people. They wanted everyone in the dark theater to have the privacy to process the more harrowing moments on their own, but also the freedom to share uplifting moments with the people around them. When Victor heard resounding laughter at an appropriate moment, they let out a sigh of relief. 'I was like, 'God. Thank God.''
'This isn't really about me,' Victor said. 'It's about us having that experience together. That's what I hold on to.'