Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the buzziest scripts of the awards season with Sorry, Baby, Eva Victor‘s impressive feature writing and directing debut that has gotten serious accolades following its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where Victor won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. It also played in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight section.
A24 landed the indie dramatic comedy in Park City and released it in theaters in late June. It has since landed a Critics Choice nomination for the original screenplay, while Victor, maybe best known for their role in Showtime’s Billions, picked up a Best Actress – Drama nom from the Golden Globes. They are also up for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Director at the Indie Spirits.
In the pic, which Victor wrote during the Covid lockdown in a Maine cabin, centers on Agnes, who we meet living in a quaint but somewhat isolated home near a New England college — they same place where she and her college roommate Lydie (Naomi Ackie, a Spirits nominee for Supporting Performer) lived when they were students. It seems Lydie and everyone else from that time has moved on, while Agnes has stayed put, on the verge of landing a big professor job in her old English department. It’s slowly revealed the reason Agnes seems stuck to everyone else: it’s the “bad thing,” being sexually assaulted by her thesis mentor (Louis Cancelmi), during her last year of school.
(The act itself is never shown; rather, Agnes emerges from the event with what happened now simply a part of her. It’s a stunningly effective device.)
The film’s story is shown in several non-linear segments, and uses plenty of gallows humor to bring the reader into Agnes’ mind-set, skipping back and forth from before, during and after the moment she can’t forget and can’t get past, living with her like a specter (the college job she takes replaces her attacker, who fled after the incident; she even takes over his office). It takes Agnes’ ride-or-die buddy Lydie (now living in New York and having a baby) and a caring, somewhat smitten neighbor (Lucas Hedges) to help her maybe find a way through.
“I found myself writing the film I felt I needed when I found myself in a similar crisis to Agnes,” Victor says about the script, which they say didn’t substantially change beyond the first draft. “I didn’t want to write about violence or assault specifically as much as I wanted to explore how a person heals. What interested me most was digging into that feeling of being stuck, seeing people you love moving on, while you’re still caught thick in the bad thing that happened to you. I started out writing this for the person I used to be.”
The film was produced in part by Barry Jenkins, Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak’s Pastel, which took Victor under its wing and and encouraged them to not only write and star but direct.
Read the screenplay below.