A film whose quietly flooring opening frames of a vast landscape becoming home to a compassionate story of a Hungarian-Canadian family navigating an uncertain world together already signal it as a major work, writer/director Sophy Romvari’s intimate and incisive “Blue Heron” only grows even greater from there. This is because the stunningly confident feature debut, while deeply personal in a way Romvari has been in her equally spectacular shorts, is one that expands outward in time just as it draws us closer in emotion.
It’s a film you can’t shake your way free of once it has you in its grasp and wouldn’t ever want to. No matter how painful it can be to take in, the way it pushes you to sit with all the many complications of a life most others would overlook is genuinely invigorating. Profoundly interested in memory and the way it gets refracted in a manner that recalls Charlotte Wells’ similarly significant recent feature debut “Aftersun” while also gently uncovering new ground all its own, “Blue Heron” signals the arrival of a bold new filmmaking voice.
Set primarily in the late 1990s on Vancouver Island, before leaping ahead years in time to ponder how everything played out, it centers the family’s struggles as seen through the perceptive eyes of the youngest daughter, Sasha (Eylul Guven).
As we soon discover, Sasha’s brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) has been struggling with his mental health and increasingly lashes out at others around him. Despite their parents (Iringó Réti and Adam Tompa) trying to figure out how it is that they can support their son, both are in over their heads. We then follow an older Sasha (Amy Zimmer), who tries to piece together this time in her life from fragmented memories and see how she could have done things differently.
No such easy answers are forthcoming.
Wonderfully shot by cinematographer Maya Bankovic with precise editing by Kurt Walker, the film is a sensory experience that authentically captures how the memories we have from our youth often come from ephemeral sights and sounds. It makes “Blue Heron” into a work both rigorously detailed and enduringly compassionate. It’s a film so delicately textured that it is as though you can practically reach out and touch the grass of the family’s yard. Of course, no matter how tightly you try to hold on to them, such memories will always slip through your fingers just as they do for Sasha.
This takes shape and form in a concluding chapter that consists of some of the most shattering sequences of the year. After we begin to see how the older Sasha is turning to mental health experts in the hopes that they can shed light on what could have been done differently, the two timelines fold in on themselves to remarkable effect.
Again, looking to “Aftersun,” Romvari’s film carries the same potent feeling as the dreamlike dance sequences Wells so strikingly brought to life. “Blue Heron” operates on a different wavelength and rhythm, with one patient shot of the older Sasha alongside her counterpart knocking you completely flat just as it remains beautifully still. When this all then further loops back in on itself, bringing us back to the beginning that now has even more power than with which it began, we hear one last final reflection that speaks directly to us through a message based on one that Romvari herself received. It provides a closing note of compassionate grace in a film overflowing with them, gently re-contextualizing everything and making you immediately wish to see it all again.
Like Sasha, we too want to hold tight to the moments in our childhood when life was tranquil, and chase away the bad ones that came later. We can’t and never will, though through Romvari’s final shot that mirrors the opening, we see our own world reflected back in shattering detail one last time. In her hands, “Blue Heron” demonstrates the full potential of the cinematic form to not just move us emotionally, but rewire our understanding of how it is that we tell stories on screen. What a joy it is that an artist like Romvari has an entire future of filmmaking ahead of her.
