Deadline Read the script series dedicated to the biggest awards season scenarios with Sorry baby, Eva VictorThe director's impressive writing and directing debut received significant recognition after its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where Victor won the Waldo Salt Award for his screenplay. He also played in the Director's Fortnight in Cannes.
A24 brings indie comedy-drama to Park City and released it in theaters at the end of June. Since then he has received Critics' Choice nomination for original screenplay, and Victor is perhaps best known for his role in the Showtime series Billionsreceived a nomination for Best Actress in a Drama Series Golden Globe. They are also up for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Director at the awards show. Indie Spirits.
The photo, which Victor painted during Covid quarantine in a cabin in Maine, focuses on Agnes, whom we meet living in a quaint but somewhat isolated house near a New England college—the same place she and her college roommate Lydie (Naomi Ackie, a Spirits nominee for supporting performer) lived as students. It seems that Lydie and everyone else have moved on since then, but Agnes has stayed put, about to take a big professor position in her old English department. The reason why Agnes seems to have attached herself to everyone else is gradually revealed: it is “bad” to be sexually assaulted by her academic advisor (Louis Canselmi) during her final year at school.
(The action itself is never shown; rather, Agnes emerges from the event with what happened now simply a part of herself. This is a stunningly effective technique.)
The film's story is told in several non-linear segments and uses a lot of gallows humor to bring the reader into Agnes's mindset, going back and forth from before, during and after a moment that she cannot forget and cannot move past, living with her as a ghost (the college job she takes over replaces the attacker who escaped after the incident; she even takes over his office). To help her, perhaps, find a way out, she needs her friend Agnes Leedy (now living in New York and expecting a child) and a caring, somewhat loving neighbor (Lucas Hedges).
“I found myself writing the movie I thought I wanted when I found myself in the same crisis as Agnes,” Victor says of the script, which they say did not change significantly from the first draft. “I didn't want to write specifically about violence or assault, I wanted to explore how a person heals. What interested me most was the feeling of being stuck, seeing the people you love move on while you're still stuck in the bad things that happened to you. I started writing it for the person I used to be.”
The film was produced in part by Barry Jenkins, Adele Romanski and Mark Serjak's Pastel Company, which took Victor under its wing and encouraged him to not only write and star, but also direct.
Read the script below.
