Eva Victor’s first feature, Sorry, Baby, has emerged from the festival circuit with the kind of acclaim reserved for films that take real risks. Critics are calling it an unusually honest, darkly funny portrait of trauma and recovery — one that sidesteps every cliché of the “survivor drama” to become something messier, funnier, and more recognisably human.

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Victor, who also stars as Agnes, builds the film around the aftermath of a sexual assault by a university professor. But instead of letting that moment define the narrative, she fragments the story into five nonlinear chapters, tracing the disorienting years that follow. The approach, reviewers say, gives Sorry, Baby a freedom rarely granted to characters written around trauma — Agnes isn’t reduced to a symbol or a diagnosis; she’s contradictory, sardonic, and sometimes infuriatingly alive.

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Rosamund Pike’s powerhouse turn in Inter Alia may be dominating the awards talk, but it’s Victor’s own performance that critics have singled out this season as the revelation. Her acting — delicate, awkward, and laced with gallows humour — carries the film’s tonal tightrope between anguish and absurdity. Reviewers from Roger Ebert.com to The Guardian describe her presence as magnetic: a performer who makes silence and stillness feel like dialogue. The supporting cast, including Naomi Ackie and Lucas Hedges, lend warmth and grounding to what could easily have been a solo character study.

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Stylistically, the film has been praised for its intimacy. The camerawork keeps close to faces, interiors, and gestures; the colour palette drifts between muted naturalism and quiet surrealism. Critics point to the way Victor uses humour not to soften pain but to frame it — creating a rhythm that mirrors the unpredictable waves of recovery. Several reviews mention the influence of Greta Gerwig’s early work and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s wry honesty, but insist Sorry, Baby is distinctly its own: stranger, riskier, more emotionally raw.

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Not everyone is entirely convinced. Some reviewers have found the film’s structure disjointed, its tone occasionally lurching from deadpan to despair without warning. The non-linear editing — while thematically deliberate — leaves a few emotional beats hanging in mid-air. Others feel Victor’s dialogue sometimes teeters on self-conscious cleverness, particularly in its more comedic interludes. Yet even the sceptics concede that the unevenness feels like the by-product of boldness, not confusion.

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The overall verdict is strikingly consistent: Sorry, Baby may not be flawless, but it is fearless. Critics admire its refusal to fit into neat emotional categories. It’s a film about surviving something horrific and then having to live a whole life afterward — a life that’s funny, boring, tender, and sometimes unbearable, all at once. It neither begs for sympathy nor hides behind irony; it simply insists on being seen.

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For cinema audiences, Sorry, Baby won’t be an easy watch — but it’s a necessary one. It’s not designed to offer closure; it offers recognition. It’s the kind of debut that announces a major new voice, one that treats pain as something that coexists with humour, friendship, and the occasional absurd dance through a world that’s still learning how to listen.

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In short, Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby is being hailed as one of 2025’s most distinctive and courageous first films — an intimate study of survival that replaces trauma porn with truth.