Watching Sorry Baby 2025 Made Me Terrified of the Teen Years

I'm sitting in seat F4 at the Alamo Drafthouse down the street, my hand frozen halfway to my mouth holding a cluster of completely cold, slightly soggy truffle popcorn that I don't even really want anymore. It's 8:15 PM on a random rainy Tuesday. Mark is right next to me, blinking at the giant glowing screen like his retinas are physically burning, and we haven't been on an actual, out-of-the-house date without children in over three months. I'm wearing black leggings that still have a faint, crusty patch of dried oatmeal near the left knee because I totally forgot to change before we left the house, and my fourth cup of coffee—a really aggressively acidic cold brew I bought at 3 PM in a moment of pure toddler-induced desperation—is currently staging a violent rebellion in my gut. We're watching the new Eva Victor film. Yeah. That one.

And I'm just sitting there in the dark, staring at the screen, thinking about how completely screwed we're all going to be when our kids grow up. Terrified.

Let me back up. Because this whole night was a massive miscalculation on my part.

The Babysitter Trap and the Parachute Pants

Lily, our fifteen-year-old babysitter, literally squealed when I told her what movie we were going to see. She was sitting cross-legged on our living room rug, wearing these massively oversized parachute pants that look exactly like the ones I wore in seventh grade and swore I'd never wear again, letting seven-year-old Maya aggressively brush her hair. "Oh my god, I want to see that so bad, it's all over my TikTok right now," she said, looking up at me with these perfectly winged eyeliner eyes.

I was frantically running around the house trying to pack the diaper bag, shoving in four-year-old Leo's absolute favorite Kianao Organic Cotton Blanket. Listen, I buy a lot of ridiculously overpriced crap for my kids, but that blanket is literally the only thing keeping our household together on a daily basis. He rubs the soft little hem against his nose when he's tired, and I ended up buying three identical ones so I can wash the original without him staging a full-scale protest in the hallway. I also blindly tossed in that Kianao Knit Beanie we got last month, which, honestly, is just okay. It's really cute and incredibly soft, but Leo has a freakishly gigantic head—99th percentile, thanks Mark—so it just sort of pops off his head like a champagne cork every ten minutes. Anyway, the point is, I handed Lily the bag, gave her twenty bucks for the pizza delivery guy, and practically sprinted to the car.

I genuinely thought this movie was a comedy. A dark, weird, quirky indie comedy because A24 produced it and the poster had this retro pink font that looked vaguely cheerful. I didn't read the reviews. I never read the reviews. Who has the time? I'm busy cutting the crusts off sandwiches and trying to remember if I paid the electric bill.

Wait, This Isn't a Quirky Comedy?

It's not a comedy. Oh god, it's so heavy. If you search for Sorry Baby 2025 online right now, you'll see a million teens romanticizing the moody aesthetic of this movie, but the actual plot is brutal. It's about a reclusive college literature professor dealing with the suffocating psychological fallout of being assaulted by her trusted mentor years ago. It's just this deeply claustrophobic, intense look at trauma and power dynamics and panic attacks.

It's a brilliantly made movie, don't get me wrong, because Eva Victor is clearly a genius behind the camera, but sitting there watching it with a cold brew headache and oatmeal on my leg, all I could think about was Lily. And Maya. And Leo.

I Need to Talk About the Mouse Scene

But before I completely spiral into teen panic, I've to talk about the mouse. Okay, so there's this one scene right in the middle of the film. I don't want to spoil the whole narrative arc but I'm going to spoil this one specific part because I'm still actively mad about it. Why is there always a random, innocent animal suffering in these artsy indie movies? It's like a strict contractual requirement for directors at this point. The main character finds this mouse struggling on the floor of her apartment, half-crushed by some kind of trap. And instead of just, I don't know, scooping it into a shoebox or leaving the apartment forever which is exactly what I'd do, she decides she has to put it out of its misery.

With a shoe.

A hard, heavy, sensible leather loafer. And she just keeps hitting it. The sound mixing in this particular theater was already way too aggressive for a Tuesday, but the wet, sickening, crunching thud of this shoe hitting the hardwood floor over and over again was just awful. I literally shoved my hands over my ears and closed my eyes like a toddler at a monster truck rally. Mark was just staring straight ahead at the screen like his soul had left his body and floated up to the projector room. I wanted to crawl under the sticky theater floor and dissolve into dust right there next to the spilled soda. WHY.

There's also like forty f-bombs and a bunch of super graphic, thrusting sex scenes throughout the movie but honestly who even cares about any of that when you've got unprovoked rodent murder happening on a thirty-foot screen.

Dr. Evans, the Brain, and the Teenage Prefrontal Cortex

Anyway. The movie eventually ends. The credits roll over some weird, discordant indie music. The lights come up and everyone in the theater is just sitting there in absolute, stunned silence. Mark looked over at me, took a slow, deliberate sip of his weird pine-needle tasting craft beer, and just whispered, "Well."

We walked out to the car in the pouring rain. I couldn't stop thinking about Lily eagerly wanting to watch this. I suddenly remembered Dr. Evans—our doctor who always looks like he hasn't slept a full night since 2018—talking to me at Leo's four-year well-visit a few weeks ago. We were discussing internet safety because Maya had accidentally seen some incredibly creepy viral video on YouTube. He said something about how an adolescent's prefrontal cortex is basically just a chaotic, unfinished construction zone of raging hormones and misfiring synapses until they're twenty-five. So they physically can't process complex, heavy, traumatic media the way a fully formed adult brain does. Or something like that. I don't fully remember the exact science because I was actively trying to stop Leo from licking a weird brown stain on the exam room floor while the doctor was talking, but the general vibe was that their brains just turn into defensive mush when they see this stuff. They simply don't have the real-world life experience to contextualize a gritty movie about the abuse of power.

Honestly, moments like this make me actively miss the newborn stage, exhaustion and all. If you're also just trying to survive the little years before they start begging to watch R-rated psychological thrillers with their friends, you can browse some honestly really nice, simple organic basics in the Kianao baby clothing collection and just pretend time isn't moving forward at the absolute speed of light. Let's just keep them in soft cotton onesies forever.

The Quiet Car Ride Home

We drove home. The windshield wipers were squeaking loudly against the glass. Mark was chewing aggressively on his thumbnail, which he only does when he's stressed about work or taxes. I kept looking out the window at the blurry streetlights streaking by. "Lily wanted to see this," I finally said into the quiet, dark car. "She thinks it's, like, a whole aesthetic."

Mark just sighed heavily, keeping his eyes on the wet road. "She's fifteen. Everything is an aesthetic."

He's right. But that's exactly what terrifies me. Social media takes these incredibly dark, mature, complicated pieces of art and turns them into trendy little fifteen-second audio clips with pink text floating over them. And these kids just absorb the vibe without knowing what they're actually walking into. The themes in this movie—consent, grooming, the heavy lingering ghost of trauma—they're so incredibly heavy. They're almost too heavy for me, and I'm a thirty-six-year-old woman who pays a mortgage and schedules my own dentist appointments.

We pulled into the driveway and the house was completely quiet. I walked inside and paid Lily, giving her an extra ten bucks because she actually managed to get Leo to sleep without him screaming the house down, which is practically a miracle. She grabbed her backpack and smiled at me from the front door. "How was the movie?" she asked, bouncing slightly on her heels. "Was it amazing?"

I just stood there in the foyer, holding my wet car keys, looking at this bright, sweet kid who still wears plastic butterfly clips in her hair. "It was... a lot," I said slowly. "Definitely not a comedy."

She shrugged, entirely unfazed by my weird tone. "My friends and I are all going to see it this weekend."

Oh god.

Holding onto the Little Years

After she left, I walked upstairs and stood quietly in the doorway of the kids' rooms. Maya was sprawled completely sideways across her bed, completely starfished, one foot hanging dangerously off the edge of the mattress. Leo was curled up in his crib, clutching that silly blanket I love, breathing in these tiny, quiet little puffs of air. I just watched them for a long time.

The heavy dread of the teenage years was sitting right on my chest like a physical, suffocating weight. Right now, my absolute biggest problem in life is getting Maya to eat a vegetable that isn't a french fry, and keeping Leo from throwing Mark's expensive running shoes directly into the toilet. It's exhausting, and I complain about it constantly to anyone who will listen, and my coffee is always disgustingly cold by the time I drink it. But they're safe. They're right here. They aren't navigating the terrifying, complicated, impossibly dark corners of the real world yet. They're just my babies.

If you're currently in the messy trenches of the toddler years and looking to swaddle your literal infant just to ignore the impending doom of adolescence for a few more minutes, go grab some ridiculously soft organic cotton gear from the Kianao shop and just hug them tightly while they still let you. Seriously. Go hug them right now.

Late Night Thoughts and Answers to Your FAQs

Q: Why is everyone talking about the 2025 movie Sorry Baby?
A: Because TikTok has completely hijacked the marketing for A24 films. You get these cool, moody edits of Eva Victor staring out a rainy window with some slowed-down, breathy indie pop song playing in the background, and suddenly every single teenager with a smartphone thinks it's a romantic coming-of-age story. It's totally misleading and incredibly frustrating for parents.

Q: Can my 14-year-old watch this movie?
A: I mean, I can't stop you from doing anything in your own house, but literally absolutely not. Unless you want to spend the next six months paying for intensive therapy and dealing with sudden night terrors. The themes of sexual violence and trauma are so aggressively heavy that even my adult, fully-developed brain wanted to tap out halfway through the runtime. Wait until they're way, way older.

Q: Is the A24 movie actually a comedy?
A: No. Honestly, it's practically a psychological horror movie completely disguised as a quirky indie drama. The only funny parts are the nervous, uncomfortable laughs you accidentally let out when you're completely overwhelmed by the tension. If you want an actual laugh, just go watch a video of someone falling off a chair.

Q: Does anything bad happen to kids in the plot?
A: No kids get hurt, thank god, because I literally would have walked right out of the theater and kept walking straight into the ocean if they did. The main characters are all adults dealing with adult problems. But obviously, as I aggressively mentioned earlier, a mouse meets a very bad end with a shoe. I'll genuinely never recover from that sound mixing. Never.

Q: How should we handle it if our teen already watched it?
A: You basically just have to sit them down in the car where they can't make direct eye contact with you and casually ask what they thought of the power dynamics in the story while desperately trying not to totally freak out when they inevitably say something that proves they completely missed the point. Just try to talk it out without turning the whole thing into a massive, eye-rolling lecture.