The Sundance Film Festival is soon to move locations to Boulder, Colorado within the next couple years, after decades of staying put in the smaller town of Park City, Utah. The move has been announced as a major shakeup for the festival, but from where I’m sitting halfway across the country, it’s at best the second biggest move the fest has made this decade. The biggest culture shift for Sundance in the 2020s has been moving a significant portion of its program online, launching a Virtual Cinema component in 2021 to compensate for the social distancing restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift from a purely in-person festival to a semi-virtual one has had some hiccups, especially since it’s invited opportunistic piracy among fanatics who’ve leaked steamier scenes of their favorite actors out of context to social media for momentary clout, jeopardizing this new resource. It has also opened the festival up to a wider range of audiences & critics who can’t afford (either fiscally or physically) to attend in-person, calling into question the value of film-festival exclusivity. I have not yet personally “attended” Virtual Sundance in any direct way, but the experience does sound like a more condensed version of how I interact with the festival anyway. Staged in January, months before the previous year’s awards cycle concludes at The Oscars, Sundance is always the first major event on the annual cinematic calendar. Intentionally or not, I spend my entire year catching up with the buzzier titles that premiere there, as they trickle down the distribution tributaries until they find their way to Louisiana. Let’s take this year for example. Swampflix has already covered ten feature films that premiered at Sundance this January — some great, some so-so: Twinless, Lurker, Dead Lover, Predators, The Ugly Stepsister, Zodiac Killer Project, Move Ya Body, Mad Bills to Pay, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and The Legend of Ochi. This was not an intentional project, just something that happened naturally by keeping up with the more significant releases of the year. And we’re still anticipating a few 2025 Sundance titles that won’t hit wide distribution until after Sundance 2026 has concluded: Obex, By Design, and Endless Cookie, to name a few. In that way, most film-nerd audiences who aren’t firmly established in The Industry are constantly attending some form of Virtual Sundance just by going to the movies week to week, so it’s been exciting to see the festival condense that slow rollout process a little bit by offering some more immediate access to their program online during the festival proper.

My unintentional Virtual Sundance experience has continued into the 11th month of the year with the recent addition of the festival standout Sorry, Baby to the streaming platform HBO Max. The positive critical reception of the film at the festival (along with a jury prize for screenwriting) positioned Sorry, Baby as one of the first Great, Must-See movies of the year, months before it would be available for wide-audience exhibition. I mention all of this not to claim the film has become overhyped or outdated in the months since, but to register my surprise at how Sundance-typical it is in practice. There are a lot of ways that Sorry, Baby‘s tone & tenor are specific to the creative voice of its writer-director-lead Eva Victor, but its storytelling structure is also unmistakably Sundancy. Here we have a story about a smart twentysomething academic navigating their way through a personally traumatic event with the help of quirky side characters played by widely respected indie-scene actors (most notably in this case, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, and John Carroll Lynch). The themes are heavy but the overall mood is defiantly light, with constant self-deprecating character humor undercutting the soul-crushing facts of modern life. Also, there’s a kitten hanging around, providing the homely comfort of the obligatory cat that lounges in every decent used bookstore. With the exception of a couple showy framing choices that consciously distance us from the protagonist’s trauma (one in physical distance, one in chronology), the filmmaking side of Sorry, Baby is secondary to the writing and the performances, which are as smartly crafted as they are grounded to reality. Victor shines brightest as a writer and a screen presence rather than as a director, with the darkness & fearlessness of the dialogue often cutting through the more restrictive, routine form of the images. They land some tricky laughs and the real-life hurt of the drama weighs heavy on the heart, but there’s not much to the film that can linger past the end credits beyond recognition that it was written by a smart person. In fact, Victor seems intent to constantly establish their mouthpiece character as the smartest person in every room, often as a way to vent about the institutional failures that compound personal trauma. Legal, medical, and academic bureaucrats play strawman to the mightier-than-the-sword screenwriter’s pen, while only the protagonist’s inner circle of supportive friends are afforded any humanistic grace notes. It’s a writer’s project first & foremost, to the point where it’s literally about the writing of a master’s thesis.

I suppose I should be more specific here and note that this is a film about the personal & professional fallout following a sexual assault. Victor plays a master’s student who is assaulted in her advising professor’s home, derailing any personal or professional development past the most traumatic event of her life. This assault is revealed to the audience indirectly. It is obscured from view behind the closed door of the professor’s home, which is framed in an extreme wide shot of rapid time elapse, chilling the audience instead of inviting us into the violence of the act. We are also kept at a distance from this violent act by the screenplay’s scrambling of the dramatic timeline, with chapter titles like “The Year with the Baby,” “The Year with the Bad Thing,” “The Year with the Questions,” and “The Year with the Good Sandwich” confusing the chronology of her trauma & recovery. At first, all we know is that she’s been stuck in time since “The Bad Thing” happened, living in the same grad-school house and working in the same dusty university offices for an eternal limbo as she puzzles her way through how to move past that moment without allowing her entire life to be defined by it. Quietly hostile interactions with doctors, lawyers, colleagues, and clueless neighbors offer Victor an opportunity to vent about how ill-equipped institutions are to address personal trauma with any empathy or humanity. The most striking thing about the movie is when Victor cuts through those broader observations about the culture of rape to rattle the audience with more personal observations. After the assault is obscured from an extreme wide-shot distance, Victor is then shown recounting minor details from the event to a roommate in intimate close-up, crouched in her bathtub. That intimacy is later echoed in a second bathtub scene in which she attempts to physically connect with her sex-buddy neighbor, who spoils the moment in much subtler, underplayed ways than the doctors & lawyers who press her for invasive details about the worst moment of her life. Whether broad or intimate, it’s all smartly observed and it’s all couched within a deadpan-humorist writing style that lessens the miserabilist potential of the topic. The question is whether having something smart to say fully justifies making a movie—as opposed to writing an essay or a stage play—beyond the form’s ability to get Victor’s words in front of as many people as possible. Sorry, Baby‘s chosen form is a useful delivery system for Victor’s writing, but I don’t know that it ever fully registers as cinematic beyond its recognizability as routine Sundance fare, to be slowly doled to the masses throughout the year.

-Brandon Ledet