Blue Heron, the feature debut from Sophy Romvari, is a surprising and tremendously moving indie drama drawn from the filmmaker’s own memories. Its elliptical narrative structure, following a troubled Hungarian Canadian family in the 1990s alongside a present-day bookend, at once obfuscates literal facts while clarifying rhythms and emotional details. It’s a film that seldom comes out and tells you exactly what’s happening, but its drama is so lucid that before any real tragedy unfolds (or is even hinted at), you feel it in your bones.
The world opens up before us in its mere 90 minutes, during which we meet a well-meaning family of six as they move into their quaint new home on Vancouver Island. The conscientious parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa) hail from Hungary. Their two middle, preadolescent sons, Henry (Liam Serg) and Felix (Preston Drabble), are as impish as their youngest daughter, Sasha (Eylul Guven), is curious and observant. However, their oldest, the bespectacled teenager Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), is more withdrawn and stands out as the only blond in a brunette family.
The movie draws its title from the bird Jeremy seems drawn toward on a family trip to a museum—the rare moment of serenity for the ill-at-ease juvenile, who soon begins acting out aggressively. He’s even brought home by the police one evening. In an especially anxious scene, the family walks in on Jeremy bleeding from his wrist, though whether this was an accident or a suicide attempt remains unanswered, further informing the movie’s remorseful retrospective. It appears to ask: could the family have done more?
The answer, if there even is one, doesn’t seem as simple as “yes” or “no.” The parents try their best to cope and to help him, between psychiatry that hasn’t yet caught up to modern standards of diagnosis and a combination of tough and abiding love, as best as they know how. Across mischievous summer afternoons portrayed with vivid warmth, the film unfolds largely through Sasha’s eyes. Its lens—courtesy of cinematographer Maya Bankovic—peeks curiously around corners and into rooms as the little girl absorbs what snippets of this adult conundrum she’s able to comprehend.
Romvari’s directorial hand is firm and formally inventive. Her camera always seems to move even during the most straightforward scenes, subtly zooming and scanning across the space for some clue or answer as to Jeremy’s troubles or how they could’ve been better dealt with at the time. All the while, the sound design feels ghostly and disembodied. During intimate dialogue scenes, words seem to emanate as if from some other realm entirely, creating a gently surreal setting woven from distant recollections.
As the family documents their time together on camcorders and film photographs, these mementos become a window to the present, during which an adult filmmaker (Amy Zimmer)—who, many details suggest, is a future version of Sasha—looks back at these treasures in digital form while conducting phone conversations and on-camera interviews about various personality disorders. The family’s story becomes a case study in search of how, given the opportunity, things could be done differently.
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BLUE HERON ★★★★ (4/4 stars) |
But in life, there are no do-overs, no matter how hard one might try. A brief introductory voiceover from Zimmer places Jeremy in the past tense, leaving one to deduce what might have happened to him. Like being sat down to receive bad news you’re expecting, the reality of what devastation the family is sure to face settles in the pit of your stomach before long and is reinforced by Romvari’s self-insert searching for answers in the present. However, what seems like a simple retrospective structure soon loops back on itself in deeply affecting ways, as the lines between present and past—between reality and memory—suddenly blur, and the film’s two apparent timelines begin unfolding in close proximity. It’s the closest any recent film has come to capturing the agonizing sensation of wishing you could go back and change the way things turned out. However, in Blue Heron, the ultimate effect of this flourish isn’t just wish fulfillment but forcing us to accept (and to want) some kind of catharsis instead of holding open old wounds and preventing them from healing.
The movie proves tender and moving even without the context of the true story that informs it. However, given its retrospective and metatextual nature—it’s the tale of a filmmaker peering back in time, searching desperately for answers that may lead nowhere—Blue Heron is made all the more powerful by foreknowledge of its tragic real-world origins. Like Sasha, Romvari comes from a family of Hungarian immigrants to Canada, and she also lost her oldest brother, Jonathan (to whom Jeremy bears a striking resemblance). The film’s thinly veiled autobiography pairs poignantly with Romvari’s documentary short Still Processing, in which she turns the lens on herself as she discovers old photographs of her deceased brother, which were kept hidden by her parents for many years.
Blue Heron’s metafictional and autofictional nature inform its remarkable aesthetics as an act of introspective reckoning. It becomes a sister piece, in some ways, to Aftersun by Charlotte Wells, in its use of videotape as a turn-of-the-century fabric able to capture and conjure the human soul. However, Romvari’s approach is also entirely unique: it’s a fearlessly vulnerable look at an artist’s powerlessness in the face of immense tragedy, as she (and her fictitious stand-in) try to cope with its ripple effects.
The movie’s imaginative form demolishes the walls of traditional flashbacks, yielding fascinating scenes of characters interacting across time—an enrapturing desire that only becomes possible through the medium of cinema. Its archival nature, as a tale of old videos and photographs, treads the difficult line of dealing with how a person can go from an “is” to a “was,” a transition that rewires the way people look at their lives and loved ones. Blue Heron lives in the intimate, unspoken space between these words and these irreconcilable modes of understanding life and death. By the time its credits roll, you may even feel more spiritually connected to yourself and those you’ve lost.
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