Sorry Baby: Eva Victor’s Film That Refuses to Heal on Cue

Image courtesy of IMDB

There’s a kind of silence that follows harm. The quiet after the apology, or the hum of a room after something breaks. You can still feel the air move differently. Sorry Baby, the directorial debut from Eva Victor, lives inside that hum. It doesn’t try to fix it or name it. It just listens.

Victor’s film arrives at a moment when “trauma” has become both diagnosis and decor—a word used to describe everything from heartbreak to history. It’s the lingua franca of a generation fluent in therapy-speak, echoed in headlines, brand campaigns and self-aware stand-up sets.

On screen, trauma has evolved its own visual shorthand: trembling hands, blurred flashbacks and redemptive monologues. What once felt unspeakable now feels, in some ways, over-spoken.

Victor sees straight through this. They doesn’t deny the gravity of what happens to their protagonist, Agnes, but they refuse to turn it into spectacle.

Observing Agnes as she returns to her life after being sexually assaulted—work, dinner with a friend, drifting home carrying an uncertainty—invites a different angle. The world occupies her, and she occupies the world, but neither in the same way she once did. Victor offers the aftermath as terrain rather than endpoint. Nothing “big” happens. Which is sort of the point.

The film dwells in the small, in-between moments that most stories skip past. What emerges isn’t spectacle but the texture of living when the world no longer feels fully inhabitable

Victor’s restraint feels almost radical. The camera stays close but never intrudes. Every performance is subtle, lived-in, carrying that delicate balance between vulnerability and endurance that defines real grief.

There are no confessions or cinematic breakthroughs. Instead, we watch someone relearn the ordinary: how to sit across from another person, how to make eye contact again and how to inhabit a body that no longer feels entirely like her own.

The dialogue drifts and doubles back, the way conversation does when words keep failing. Victor captures the awkward, imperfect ways people try to connect when language can’t hold the weight of what they mean. There’s also no attempt to sound profound or poetic, and that restraint becomes its own form of honesty. 

For all its quiet, Sorry Baby is a deeply social film. Victor resists the narrative of triumph that culture demands from survivors. Their story lingers in uncertainty, where progress isn’t linear and healing always come with closure. It gestures toward a more honest form of survival, one that values presence over performance. 

If you go into this expecting revelation, you’ll find yourself restless. If you lean into the hum, you’ll feel the film working. Because the truth is: some stories don’t end. They just settle. And we’re left living around them.