In the 2018 film The Tale, director Jennifer Fox explores a childhood trauma by casting actors as herself at different ages, including as a grownup filmmaker. It’s a fascinating, unnerving bit of meta filmmaking, studying memory’s limits with almost reportorial curiosity. The Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari does something similar with the new movie Blue Heron, a semi-autobiographical piece whose structure loops in on itself, melding fact and fiction into a doleful portrait of a family tragedy. It has a softer touch than Fox’s film, though, and in that way perhaps obscures too much.

The film opens sometime in the late 1990s. A family of five — three brothers, one sister, their Hungarian immigrant parents — move to a new home near the British Columbia coast. This seems like a harmonious enough occasion; the house has light and space, and life appears to settle into a cozy rhythm. Young Sasha (Eylul Guven) is the only daughter, perhaps a bit lost in the rambunctious storm of her brothers, but she quickly finds friends in the neighborhood, embarking on a summer of little adventures and discoveries. 

Before too long, though, we detect a disturbance. Sasha’s eldest brother, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), has entered into a serious brooding-teen phase — or, perhaps, something worse. He’s aloof and stubborn, seemingly deaf to his parents as they try to coax him back into the family fold. He walks away from a family trip to the beach and barely reacts to his mother’s anger and panic when she finally finds him loitering at a gas station hours later. Other increasingly erratic, reckless behavior ensues, and we peer in on the parents as they have fraught, hushed conversations about what to do with their troubled boy. 

Romvari drifts between perspectives; sometimes we are only privy to what Sasha overhears, in other moments we hover closely around mom (Iringó Réti) and dad (Ádám Tompa) as their marriage strains. He, some kind of artist and photographer, has a tendency to check out, only present for the rare moments when Jeremy is in a sunnier, friendlier mood. That parenting schism is maybe complicated by the fact that Jeremy is the child of the mother’s first marriage; caring as his adopted father can be, there is a certain distance between the men. 

But such contributing factors to Jeremy’s malaise are only lightly prodded at in Blue Heron, which is mostly interested in creating a delicate sense of mood and place, particularly the hazily recalled ramble of childhood. Romvari deftly synthesizes that kind of quotidian flow, days bleeding into one another as something significant foments at the margins of the everyday. The film on occasion calls to mind Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which did a similarly convincing job of conjuring up the tones and textures of a life remembered in piecemeal, with both fondness and ache.

Blue Heron takes on a more robust intent about halfway through, as Romvari shifts into the present day, when Sasha is grown up (played by Amy Zimmer) and is doing a kind of investigation into her brother’s gradual estrangement from the family. Sasha, like Romvari, is a filmmaker, and is working on a project that involves interviewing social workers who have just reviewed her brother’s case, now decades old. Romvari weaves some documentary into the picture; these social workers, including one who worked directly with her family, are real people. Their voices add a crucial objectivity to Romvari’s recollections; here are the plain facts of the matter: unadorned and, in their way, dispassionate.

If Blue Heron is at all critical of a system that failed Jeremy, it is only subtly so. The film mostly exists as an exercise in further tilling personal earth that Romvari previously traversed in her short films. At times, especially toward the end of this fleet 90 minutes, I wanted something a bit more dramatically engaging. Romvari chooses to tell us what became of Jeremy (in very light detail) rather than show us in any real way. It’s not hard to understand why that decision might have been made, sensitive as the topic is to the filmmaker. But the turn to something like plainspoken didacticism makes Blue Heron feel slighter than it perhaps should. We lilt through Sasha’s past and are then simply given a faint outline of what happened next. The steadily accumulated emotional weight of the film dissipates rather quickly as it reaches its abrupt ending. 

Still, Blue Heron is an affecting, promising debut feature. Romvari smartly uses the stunning natural landscape of the area surrounding Vancouver to lend her film some cinematic heft. Her music choices, mournful and dreamy, also add a sense of significance. Retí’s is the standout performance, cogently mapping a mother’s tenacity buckling under a mounting feeling of helplessness at watching her child disappear into a mystery. One wishes we could be reunited with her later on in the story, but Romvari keeps the mother fixed in the past. Which may be a sad indication of what these sorry events did to each member of her family. But Ramvari doesn’t give us any specifics about that; perhaps some of the story is just for her.