CW: This movie and review contain mentions of sexual assault throughout, though none is shown in the movie on screen. Discretion is advised.
The shot that echoes most in Eva Victor’s directorial debut is that of a door frame. It’s not placed symmetrically in frame and it’s at a slight tilt too. Sometimes the frame will contain a further door, that second door leading to the world outside main character Agnes’s (Eva Victor) house. We see Agnes check on this outside door a couple of times, the camera leaving us peering in at a near incidental angle. She tends to investigate noises that may or may not reflect a real sound from the outside; Sorry, Baby plays a lot with viewers hearing things without seeing them. These door shots, alongside variations of them peppered throughout the stunningly efficient 103-minute runtime of the film, keenly echo humanistic, studied non-American influences: the humanism of privileging ordinary houses from Japanese king Yasujiro Ozu and the details of the composition taken from Taiwanese new wave pioneer Edward Yang.
Sorry, Baby is as human as the best works of either director. We follow Agnes through five years of her life, going from a final year post-graduate English student to a full-time professor, buoyed along this journey by her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie, in her best turn of the year) and her lovable doofus of a neighbour, Gavin (Lucas Hedges). For a movie framed by time, however, with title cards stating the year in a coy manner (my favorite being “The Year with the Good Sandwich”), it’s how time fails to move for Agnes that is most interesting. Without spoiling specifics, the dark cloud of sexual assault hangs over Agnes, and it seems to hold her in place even as her life goes on, her career evolves and her adopted cat grows up. This is in contrast to Lydie, whose life in the final year of the film is drastically different to her life at the start, and Agnes’s lack of change is the catalyst for her developing relationship with Gavin, a man who is content and happy in his unchangingness, for as much as we learn anything concrete about him. The times Victor chooses to show us also reflect this stasis to some extent; for as stunning as the colours are in this movie, popping while still retaining a more naturalistic style, and for as beautiful as the grand pacific north west landscape is, we never see the trees at the camera’s periphery in bloom. It can be hard for leaves to bloom if it feels like the whole planet has come to a standstill.
Victor reflects that stasis with their editing and shots, too. I never checked the time in the theatre, engrossed as I was, but victor displays a discipline with their shot choice, allowing a lingering while characters have disappeared from frame, another Yang-like quality. As opposed to Yang, however, who will often have characters and objects return into frame after some time, Victor has a love for focusing on extremes. On the one hand are the absences, the frames empty of people; one of the pivotal scenes of the movie is entirely implied and never shown, where all we see of it is the front of a two-storey house, moving from day to night. On the other is a love of close-ups, not an uncommon quality for an actor-director such as themself, and one that exists in wonderful contradiction with their empty frames. Coping after a sexual assault can be a weird, fragmentary process, and learning to renavigate the boundaries of such a deep vulnerability will look differently for all sorts of people. If I were to dive into further specifics, I’d likely spoil a lot of this movie’s most tragic and funniest moments.
The final moments of Sorry, Baby see us returning to the flash-forward start of the movie. Agnes is left in charge of a baby, and unsure quite what to do with them, picks them up and brings them to the greenhouse portion of her house, which we are seeing for the first time. There have been scattered moments of warmth among the cold weather and colours of the film, and here it sees a subtle return in light changes to the colour grade. The infant cannot talk, obviously; they just babble and half-stand with the help of Agnes holding them up. This confrontation with the most unignorable reminder of time, the reminder that we were all babies and many of us have moved impossibly far away from that, seems to sit with Agnes, as she says she has trouble connecting them with a future child or adult. The conversation is strewn with hope, however, as she finally seems ready, in some form, to move forward with time and keep living. She’s not perfectly ready, but none of us ever really are.
This movie is likely finished or near the end of its run in the Irish Film Institute at the time of publication, so if you can’t catch it, be sure to pick up a physical copy when it releases. It’s easily my current favourite film of the year; while 2025 has offered some compelling releases, nothing quite made my heart twinge like Sorry, Baby.
