The recent discourse in the film commentary community about everyone’s favorite films of the 21st century so far has been fun, fascinating, and enlightening. Aside from Sinners, I didn’t expect another contender for my personal list to appear so soon, but that’s exactly how I feel about Sorry, Baby.
Not only does star Eva Victor’s writing and directing debut strike a perfect balance between drama and comedy while exploring some extremely tough subject matter, it’s also an incisive dissection of millennial malaise, which, given the current state of world affairs, no longer feels like a niche issue within our broader national context. Consistently going above and beyond its important and well-realized premise, Sorry, Baby is a portrait of people trying — sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing — to relate to one another and be intentional with their reserves of empathy. For all these reasons and more, I consider it to be one of the essential American films of the past several years, and perhaps of the century so far.
Victor plays Agnes, a newly-hired young professor at the small New England literature school they attended as a graduate student. They live in a cozy little house away from the main part of town. We get to know this house as a character unto itself while the film tells its story in chapters out of chronological order. In most of the segments, Agnes is accompanied by their best friend and roommate Lydie (Naomi Ackie). In the present-day segments, Agnes is dealing with both the aftermath of a horrible act done to them by a professor when they were a student, and the impact of Lydie’s choices to move away, get married, and have a child.
In many ways, the film is about choices we make in response to circumstances and behaviors of other people which we cannot control. It’s also about the concept of control itself and how it manifests in pernicious ways throughout all levels of our society. What blows my mind about how it approaches these big ideas is that it does it with a small cast, in a small-town setting, telling a story that is clearly very personal to Victor. Winner of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, this film displays a level of perception and the abilities to communicate this perception through believable dialogue that many, if not most filmmakers never master.
Another reason I would call Sorry, Baby a distinctly timely and distinctly American masterpiece is that it has this gently blunt disposition when it comes to cultural snags related to how we talk about sexuality, gender, gender roles, and sexual assault in this country. Every punchline is profound without ever coming off as preachy. It’s a dark comedy at times, to be sure, and it certainly has brilliant moments of dark drama, but the tone is so assured that no one element outshines any other. In the writing, direction, and performance of so many scenes, it must have taken gargantuan effort to balance all these elements, but Victor and their talented cast make it seem effortless. It feels exactly like how people discuss these things in real life while still being able to engage the heightened comedy necessary to create a true dramedy classic.
One more thing: this film looks great. It might go unnoticed, but the way this sleepy little town and its adjacent outdoor settings are photographed settles us into a sense of earned realism just as much as the writing does. For a film that’s partially about literature, it feels like reading a really memorable novel. For all its heaviness, we’re sad to get to the last page, but also satisfied that we were swept up in someone’s vision and analysis of a time and place. Specificity beats generality every time. | George Napper
