How Eva Victor’s ‘Sorry, Baby’ Transforms Personal Trauma into a Healing Journey (Exclusive)

Whenever Eva Victor hears that her directorial debut has resonated with someone, she says, it’s “very rewarding, and also sad.” Sorry, Baby, inspired by a dark period of the writer-director-star’s life, follows a grad student-turned-professor navigating the disorienting aftermath of sexual assault. As Victor, 31, tells PEOPLE, “It’s not such a simple thing to have people connect to a film like this.”

Yet the Sundance Film Festival award-winning indie distinguishes itself from other stories about trauma with Victor’s secret weapon: a disarmingly wry sense of humor. By using laughter as medicine, the comedian-turned-filmmaker (who uses they/she pronouns) shifts focus from the act of sexual violence to the ups and downs and zigs and zags of healing.

“I was writing for a person who really wanted to engage with the world about the absurdity of that kind of trauma,” says the Billions star, who relocated from New York City to rural Maine during the COVID-19 pandemic to binge films and write something that felt “as gentle as I wanted to be treated at the time.”

Sorry, Baby might hinge on an assault, but Victor didn’t want any “shocking feeling” in it, “an image that is so shocking and violent that the body stops working and has to protect itself while watching.” Instead, Victor says, “I wanted the film to feel like a hug.”

Victor took the approach far enough to opt out of showing the violent act that disrupts the college town life Agnes (played by Victor) lives. “We don’t need to see what she goes through to know what she goes through,” explains the filmmaker. “And we never question whether it happened.”

One factor that transformed Sorry, Baby from what Victor calls “a scream” to a “group of [people] standing there in the scream, willing to create the scream with you,” was Barry Jenkins and the Moonlight director’s production company Pastel. Victor’s online videos (many of which have gone viral, like their skewering the notion of Straight Pride) were proof, to the Oscar-winning filmmaker, of an auteur in the making. 

Jenkins, 45, “at one point said, ‘Those videos are filmmaking,’” recalls Victor. “‘You’re making all the choices about what shots there are and what people look like, and you’re doing the edit. That’s directing.’”

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What did Victor learn from conceiving and leading a directorial debut? “Taking care of the body,” she says, is paramount. “It can be anything from stretching to Nutella Uncrustables being at the ready to—” Victor interrupts, grinning, to pull out a harness-like back massage tool and demonstrate how it kneads her neck. 

Sorry, Baby was also a therapeutic experience for Victor, who “made the film to feel less lonely” and ended up building a community of like-minded storytellers. Costar Naomi Ackie, says Victor, is “made of light. So it was a true joy to have her there, and she was so trusting from the get.” The same was true of Jenkins and his team, as well as costars Lucas Hedges, John Carroll Lynch, Louis Cancelmi and Kelly McCormack. 

“The experience of writing about a time that is the very demented, surreal thing of someone deciding where your body goes without your permission and decides to control you without any consent,” Victor adds, was cathartic.

“To be able to direct myself as an actor and say, ‘No, this is where my body’s going today and I have control over that … that is a very meta, powerful thing to be able to say, ‘This is what I want it to be.’”

A24 has released Sorry, Baby in select theaters now; its wide release is July 25. 

If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org.