Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby doesn’t announce itself. And yet, it arrives fully formed, like someone who’s spent enough time in therapy to know that the best medicine is to laugh at their own ridiculous idiosyncrasies. Premiering at Sundance, closing out Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, and now screening at SIFF, the film has quietly (and then not-quite-so-quietly) become one of the most talked-about directorial debuts of 2025. And yet, talking to Victor, there’s no sign they’re taking the acclaim too seriously.

Note: Eva Victor uses she/they pronouns. This article alternates between them accordingly.

When asked what part of this whirlwind release they hadn’t anticipated, Victor offered, “It’s interesting to go from knowing who’s seen the movie to not being sure who’s seen the movie,” she said. “There’s this kind of realization that you’re releasing this into the world and it’s no longer yours, and it kind of belongs to whoever finds it. Which is kind of a relief and also kind of weird, but also kind of nice. Because for so long, I’ve been there while people have been watching it, and answering questions, and I’m like— eventually, I’m not going to be there. And maybe it’s supposed to be that way. You’re supposed to go see the movie in private, and then you’re supposed to have your own experience of it, and I’m not really a part of that, except for in the fact that I made the movie.”

That tension between control and surrender is all over Sorry, Baby, a film that blends bruising emotional truths with the kind of sharp, observational comedy Victor honed in the digital sketch world. When asked what inspired her to write with such honesty, Victor didn’t immediately reach for a film reference. Instead, she lit up talking about the stage.

“You know, there’s this play that really affected me when I read it—The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? Have you read that play?” Victor asked, eyes lighting up. “It’s a crazy play. It’s about a guy who’s cheating on his wife with a goat, and she finds out, and she’s really upset and kills the goat and drags the goat onto the stage.” They laughed, almost apologetically. “So that’s a really crazy play, but it’s so good. And kind of funny, and kind of like… devastating.”

Books and plays, it seemed, had shaped Victor’s storytelling instincts more than any screenplay she could immediately recall. “The Bell Jar is something I remember reading and being like, ‘Thank God someone else is depressed. Jesus Christ.’ Everyone’s really sad and mad about the book because obviously it has its own legacy. But I remember reading it being like, this is funny. Like, this is funny and good.”

That’s the playbook Sorry, Baby seems to follow. Victor’s feature writer-director-star debut trails Agnes, played by Victor themself, through the psychic and logistical fallout of sexual trauma — HR meetings, absurd medical encounters, nosy neighbors, and the quieter, more surreal betrayals of memory. The film unfolds with warmth and wit and then hits you with a southpaw of Fielder Method-approved cringe comedy. “When things would get really dark in the writing, I’d be like, I need to write a lighter scene next. Not just for the audience, but because I need to survive the writing.”

She describes humor not as a seasoning for their process, but a survival tactic. “It can be a way to exhale,” they explained. “But it also heightens things. Like, the doctor scene — he’s saying all the wrong things, but because Agnes and Liddy are this unified front, they can see how weird it is. And that lets us laugh. After something really heavy.”

Victor’s sense of comedic ethics, an instinct for punching up, not down, comes from years writing comedy and satire. “We never made fun of the people who were suffering or out of power. It was always about mocking the systems, the people in power,” she said. In Sorry, Baby, that translates to the banal evil of entrenched institutions being the punching bag, but also the emotional obstacle course.

That same clarity of ethics and habit of self-editing carried over from Victor’s sketch work into her directing process. “The thing that I think I learned from the videos that was really helpful was, I would watch takes that I did and then decide very quickly if I liked my performance or not, and then do them again if I needed to,” she said. “So I had that skill, and I actually found it to be pretty figured out for when I was on set.”

After years in the Comedy Central trenches, Victor wasn’t flying blind but knew where her gaps were. “I feel like I had a handle on how to edit something to be funny,” they said. “But I had very little awareness, or I was just worried, about how to edit the film so that there was serious dramatic tension throughout.” So she brought in editor Alex O’Flinn. “I really wanted to hire him because he has an understanding of story that I think was kind of new to me,” Victor said. The two worked closely to preserve the emotional spine of the film, even when that meant letting go of some of its most beloved moments. “There were scenes that felt so special in the script—like, people would always say, ‘that sandwich scene, man’—but we got to the edit and we couldn’t keep them. They diffused the tension in a way that just didn’t work.” Kill your darlings, as they say. And Sorry, Baby makes every cut count. She laughed. “It’s like a math experiment the whole time. Take out this, put in this. It’s a puzzle.”

Nowhere was that recalibration more intense than with one of the film’s seriocomic crescendoes: the jury scene. Victor had initially envisioned it as one of the film’s broadest comedic beats. “It was scripted to be kind of like, honestly, slapstick,” they said. “Like, maybe the most comedic of the whole film.” But once they were shooting, that tone didn’t hold. “I was kind of feeling that Agnes was suffering a great deal while we were shooting that. And I was like, okay—so that’s interesting to note, ’cause this wasn’t written to be this emotional.”

In the edit, the scene was rebuilt almost from scratch. “Agnes was supposed to stand up and give this, like, weird round of applause moment. And we were just like—this is completely weird. It doesn’t make any sense.” Editor Randy Adkins reworked the sequence. “We rewrote the scene in the edit. It went from like 20 minutes to 10 or something,” Victor said. “And it became a lot less funny, but a lot more heartfelt. Or just a lot more difficult for the character, which I think was really important.”

“I never wanted to tip too far toward funny, where it felt like it was sacrificing the heart of it,” she said. “And I never wanted it to be dramatic just to kind of shock. So it was a constant calibration. It was intense.”

Victor joins an elite collection of creators who have written, directed, and starred in a film, each role the most challenging whenever it was what she was doing in the moment. As someone who has been very public about their struggles with anxiety, being in front of the camera certainly carried its own challenges. “Every single time I was like… well, fuck,” they admitted. “But you realize, you can’t really blame anyone but yourself.”

And yet, somehow, it worked. “Deep down in your soul, it’s what you want to do. So you’re gonna just have to prepare, prepare, prepare, so that by the time you get there, you’re not bad because you’re unprepared. You’re bad because you can’t do it,” they said, laughing. “But luckily, I figured out how to do it.”

“If you’d asked me at any point, I would’ve said the thing I was doing at the time was definitely the hardest part.” What helped keep them grounded was focusing on the source code: the script. “At some point, it’s no longer about you, you know? It’s about the script. People believe in the film because of the script.” That meant constantly asking: what would Agnes do? “It was very helpful to me to decenter myself and be like, ‘Well, what would Agnes actually do? How would Liddy be moving? How would they be sitting?’ It’s just all about going back to the script and being like, what’s true?”

Even her weekends mid-shoot were a blur. “I would watch Housewives in the bath and eat cookies,” they said. “But I don’t really remember that time because it was like a blur.”

Nevertheless, it was an experience she wouldn’t trade for anything. “I think I feel very spoiled, because I got to have my dreams come true,” she said. “And I got to make something that felt really special to make, and I got to do everything I wanted to do in it, honestly.”

“I’m not really thinking about it like, ‘Would I direct again, would I write again,’” she said. “It’s just that this special thing happens when you find a script, or I find an idea, or something that speaks to your gut. I’m supposed to put my body in this. I’m supposed to direct this, ‘cause it feels like somehow, like, my soul wrote it—even if someone else wrote it. Or I’m supposed to write something for this person because it’s the right idea.”

And if the next project doesn’t ring true emotionally then it’s not worth it. “It’s so hard to make a movie,” they said. “It really is. It takes so much time, and it’s very, very intense. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. But you have to care so much, or else it doesn’t make sense why you’re doing it.”

As for their personal favorite film of the year? No hesitation. “Sinners. It’s so fucking good,” she said. This checks out. Both Sinners and Sorry, Baby made their mark not by reinventing the wheel, but by steering it somewhere you didn’t expect. Bold, original, and deeply felt, they take familiar frameworks and crack them apart just enough to let something real bleed through.

[READ MORE: All of our coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival ’25.]

For other reviews, interviews, and featured articles, be sure to:

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook 
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter