Stream It Or Skip It?

The year’s best directorial debut is Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby (now streaming on HBO Max), a wrenchingly funny, and just as wrenchingly heartbreaking, dramedy about a young woman navigating the aftermath of a “bad thing” that derailed her life. Victor writes, directs and stars in this small, intimate film boasting Moonlight director Barry Jenkins as a producer; it debuted to raves at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and has since accumulated critical praise and become an indie-level sleeper hit ($3 million at the box office). And deservingly so, as it takes an appropriately thorny approach to a thorny subject, with memorable, affecting results.

SORRY, BABY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The camera does not move. It sits quietly, observing a house in a remote, lightly wooded locale, from a distance that’s not too far and not too close. Agnes (Victor) lives there. Eventually, the narrative begins. It’s not in a hurry. A title card tells us this is The Year With the Baby, the first of a few segments in a jumbled, nonlinear narrative. Lydie (Naomi Ackie) arrives at Agnes’ house for a visit. We’ll soon piece together that they were inseparable during graduate school, having lived in this same house together until Lydie moved to New York City and got married. They fall right back into their intimacies, like sitting on the opposite ends of a couch under the same blanket and laughing about how men have sex, or sleeping in the same bed together. Lydie picks up a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita, opens it and says “Ew” – Agnes teaches the novel, having recently landed a full-time professorship at the university they attended. Soon, Lydie learns that Agnes is sleeping with her modestly charming neighbor Gavin (Lucas Hedges). Lydie also reveals that she’s pregnant. They also share a conversation about Agnes not killing herself that’s dark but irreverent and funny but serious. 

The film jumps back three years. I think it’s three years – it’s not clear. It jumps around a lot. The uncertainty is the point. This is The Year With the Bad Thing. Agnes and Lydie grind away at their theses. There’s some sexual tension between Agnes and her prof advisor, Preston (Louis Cancelmi), which Agnes and Lydie joke about. Preston has to cut short a review session – he’s divorced and has to pick up his sick child from school – with Agnes and reschedules for later, at his home, where the camera sits at a remove, across the street, as she enters during daylight and the sun dims and sets and then she exits carrying her boots, which she pauses to quickly pull on, not bothering to tie the laces. Place that eccentricity among growing evidence, which we observe in subsequent moments, that this Agnes is not the same Agnes that went in that door. 

We get a scene in which Agnes encounters a kitten in the road and immediately sees something lost, unaccompanied, vulnerable, capable, beautiful, affectionate and clearly desiring more than that, since it purrs like a lawnmower as soon as she picks it up; she brings it home and names it Olga. She visits a doctor oblivious to his callous tone; she visits with two female university officials who awkwardly and performatively assert, “We know what you’re going through – we are women.” In another scene, she meets Gavin for the first time and later they spend time together (mostly in bed) and he seems sweet but commitment may not be feasible for Agnes. A key sequence puts her in a courthouse under consideration for jury duty, where she gets a lesson in “direct testimony” and faces questions, in front of the other potential jurors, and the judge, and a stenographer, and and and, about whether she’s been the victim of a crime that might make her biased in this case. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The final scene mirrors the one that rips your heart out in Call Me By Your Name. Victor said in interviews that they followed Jane Schoenbrun while they shot I Saw the TV Glow. And Sorry, Baby is the work of a first-time auteur-type director like Emma Seligman, whose awkwardly funny indie Shiva Baby felt like a similarly vital debut. 

Performance Worth Watching: Victor is often insightful, deep, funny and earnest all at once, and has amazing, lived-in chemistry with Ackie. Also, watch out for the ever-brilliant John Carroll Lynch in a single scene as a stranger I call the Sandwich Guy, the rare person Agnes encounters who listens to and understands her. 

Memorable Dialogue: This is an extraordinary screenplay: “That sounds like – that – that’s the thing,” Lydie says after Agnes tells her what happened with Preston. “I don’t see myself,” Agnes says to Gavin, turning an unfinished sentence into a tragically finished one. And Agnes bullseyes cat ownership with, “Olga, what the f—! If you wanted to kill it you should’ve just killed it!”

Sex and Skin: A few non-graphic, non-nude scenes. Note for sensitive viewers: we do not see the “bad thing.”

Our Take: In an interview with the Sundance Institute, Victor said Sorry, Baby reflects their own traumatic experiences, specifically “the part where you’re confused.” Hence, the film’s fractured structure, a shuffling of scenes from here and there on Agnes’ timeline, emulating the bizarre sense of disconnection Victor likely felt, and that Agnes feels. That angle allows Victor to heighten our protagonist’s reality with moments boasting a whiff of the surreal; the fact that few people know what to do around Agnes or what to say to her are opportunities for near-gallows humor, with dialogue delivered with odd, flattened affectations. Those people just… don’t get it. And there are too many of them. The Sandwich Guy? He’s not one of them, and Lynch delivers the goods in one of the most affecting dramatic – and comic – movie scenes in recent memory.

You can’t say enough about the interactions between Victor and Ackie, who capture the rhythms of deep, resounding friendship with great accuracy and honesty. If you have a friendship like this in your life, cherish it. If you meet a stranger in your life like the Sandwich Guy, make them a stranger no more. If you meet someone who makes great sandwiches like the Sandwich Guy, eat them. If you find a kitten and you feel a connection, feed it and accept it for the horrible things it will occasionally do (remember, it’s a predator by nature, and a cruel one). Anyway: It’s all the more tragic to see Lydie’s life progress and blossom while Agnes’ is in a paralytic state – she lives in the same house and struggles to relate to other people and works in the same place, which is a good thing on the surface, but full of triggers that bring her right back to The Year With the Bad Thing. By the final scene, Agnes can finally see forward, through a lens of despair tinged with hope, and our hearts ache when we realize that the opposite should be true.

Our Call: Who’s going to join me at the front of the line for Victor’s next film? STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.