{"id":263470,"date":"2025-11-05T04:04:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T04:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/263470\/"},"modified":"2025-11-05T04:04:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T04:04:08","slug":"stream-it-or-skip-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/263470\/","title":{"rendered":"Stream It Or Skip It?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The year\u2019s best directorial debut is Eva Victor\u2019s Sorry, Baby (now streaming on HBO Max<\/a>), a wrenchingly funny, and just as wrenchingly heartbreaking, dramedy about a young woman navigating the aftermath of a \u201cbad thing\u201d that derailed her life. Victor writes, directs and stars in this small, intimate film boasting Moonlight<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

SORRY, BABY<\/a>: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?<\/p>\n

The Gist: The camera does not move. It sits quietly, observing a house in a remote, lightly wooded locale, from a distance that\u2019s not too far and not too close. Agnes (Victor) lives there. Eventually, the narrative begins. It\u2019s 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\u2019 house for a visit. We\u2019ll 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\u2019s Lolita, opens it and says \u201cEw\u201d \u2013 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\u2019s pregnant. They also share a conversation about Agnes not killing herself that\u2019s dark but irreverent and funny but serious.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The film jumps back three years. I think it\u2019s three years \u2013 it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 he\u2019s divorced and has to pick up his sick child from school \u2013 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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, \u201cWe know what you\u2019re going through \u2013 we are women.\u201d 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 \u201cdirect testimony\u201d and faces questions, in front of the other potential jurors, and the judge, and a stenographer, and and and, about whether she\u2019s been the victim of a crime that might make her biased in this case.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Sorry Photo: Everett<\/p>\n

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The final scene mirrors the one that rips your heart out in Call Me By Your Name<\/a>. Victor said in interviews that they followed Jane Schoenbrun while they shot I Saw the TV Glow<\/a>. And Sorry, Baby is the work of a first-time auteur-type director like Emma Seligman, whose awkwardly funny indie Shiva Baby<\/a> felt like a similarly vital debut.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Memorable Dialogue: This is an extraordinary screenplay: \u201cThat sounds like \u2013 that \u2013 that\u2019s the thing,\u201d Lydie says after Agnes tells her what happened with Preston. \u201cI don\u2019t see myself,\u201d Agnes says to Gavin, turning an unfinished sentence into a tragically finished one. And Agnes bullseyes cat ownership with, \u201cOlga, what the f\u2014! If you wanted to kill it you should\u2019ve just killed it!\u201d<\/p>\n

Sex and Skin: A few non-graphic, non-nude scenes. Note for sensitive viewers: we do not see the \u201cbad thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SORRY, Photo: A24 \/ courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

Our Take: In an interview with the Sundance Institute, Victor said Sorry, Baby reflects their own traumatic experiences, specifically \u201cthe part where you\u2019re confused.\u201d Hence, the film\u2019s fractured structure, a shuffling of scenes from here and there on Agnes\u2019 timeline, emulating the bizarre sense of disconnection Victor likely felt, and that Agnes feels. That angle allows Victor to heighten our protagonist\u2019s 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\u2026 don\u2019t get it. And there are too many of them. The Sandwich Guy? He\u2019s not one of them, and Lynch delivers the goods in one of the most affecting dramatic \u2013 and comic \u2013 movie scenes in recent memory.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t 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\u2019s a predator by nature, and a cruel one). Anyway: It\u2019s all the more tragic to see Lydie\u2019s life progress and blossom while Agnes\u2019 is in a paralytic state \u2013 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Our Call: Who\u2019s going to join me at the front of the line for Victor\u2019s next film? STREAM IT.<\/p>\n

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The year\u2019s best directorial debut is Eva Victor\u2019s Sorry, Baby (now streaming on HBO Max), a wrenchingly funny,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263471,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[29193,64,63,154441,35517,154442,154443,134,48782,9086,154444,14884,344,154445,99889],"class_list":["post-263470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-a24","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-barry-jenkins","tag-comedies","tag-dark-comedy","tag-dramas","tag-entertainment","tag-eva-victor","tag-film-festivals","tag-john-carroll-lynch","tag-movie-reviews","tag-movies","tag-naomi-ackie","tag-sundance-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}