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. 

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Blue Heron, 2025.

Written and Directed by Sophy Romvari.
Starring Eylul Guven, Iringó Réti, Ádám Tompa, Edik Beddoes, Amy Zimmer, Liam Serg, Preston Drabble, Lucy Turnbull, and Jecca Beauchamp.

SYNOPSIS:

A family of six settles into their new home on Vancouver Island as internal dynamics are slowly revealed through the eyes of the youngest child.

At one point in writer/director Sophy Romvari’s meta-reflective and profoundly personal 1990s-set Blue Heron, young Sasha (Eylul Guven) asks her mother (credited as such and played by Iringó Réti) if her friends can come over and play outside (the film primarily takes place during a warm, breezy summer filled with swimming and bursting water balloons), only to be told that it’s not a good idea. It could be” embarrassing”, even, given that her older brother Jeremy (the eldest child, played by a truly unknowable and unsettling Edik Beddoes) has a behavioral disorder that is gradually becoming more erratic, unstable, volatile, and dangerous to himself and those around him. 

More than a film that convincingly portrays such a condition, and the lack of systemic resources and knowledge among psychologists and social services to properly help, Blue Heron approaches it from the narrative and cinematic perspective of a child eavesdropping on her parents (her father, played by Ádám Tompa mostly sticks to his computer-based work, avoiding what’s happening until that is no longer possible). Roughly halfway through, Sophy Romvari adds another layer, this time an experimental aspect in the present day that takes everything from the past and puts it under a new microscopic lens, juxtaposing those experiences and how Sasha feels as an adult (now played by Amy Zimmer), making films to reach a greater understanding of her brother and the rocky dynamic they had.

In some respects, it’s about a child’s first exposure to a disability or some type of condition destabilizing socially acceptable behavior, the frustrations that come with that from not only navigating it at such a young age, but during a time when adults also didn’t have much of an answer, later squared up against the fleeting happy memories, the reality of the situation, regret, and an adult perspective. At times, the film brilliantly and beautifully fuses the older perspective with the childhood memories and scenes, creating genuinely innovative emotional poignancy.

Much of this is elevated by striking cinematography (courtesy of Maya Bankovic) that is doing more than simply observing family interactions and dialogue through Sasha, but also sometimes utilizing tracking shots from an outdoor point of view following characters walking across the home, as if reappearing into something deeply personal on a narrative level and a similar sense regarding the filmmaker. The photography also makes use of reflections in numerous scenes, with the additional twist of characters sometimes reflecting back at one another, or of eerie ghosting that seemingly duplicates faces. Nearly everything about the filmmaking approach contributes to the reflexive nature of the story being told, a contemplation of whether something more or better could have been done to help Jeremy.

Then there is Jeremy (practically nonverbal, blonde-haired, sporting glasses, generally giving off quietly unhinged, emotionally distant vibes) who isn’t treated as a cheap caricature, but a real person who, at some point, changed (some family history is revealed providing fascinating context) and now teeters between serene moments of gentleness (most notably with Sasha at a beach) and outbursts that start off relatively harmless but blossom into full-blown threats of burning the house down (it’s also important to point out that the threat itself is kept offscreen, which is a smart decision so as not to exploit the behavior for misguided suspense; it’s not about whether or not he will follow through on any of this).

It should go without saying that these performances are nuanced, layered, and extraordinary across the board. However, it is that inventive second-half turn that elevates Blue Heron into a truly original work that takes the exploration of a condition and a child’s initial experiences around it, or how the entire situation alters and breaks apart the family dynamic into something far more profound regarding memory, sibling bonds, and systemic failings.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist