‘Blue Heron’ Review: Sophy Romvari Immortalizes a Memory in a Profound Act of Courage [A-] (SFFILM)
Few themes have been as beat to the ground in contemporary cinema as family-induced pains. Be it horror allegories, genre-spanning adventures, or prestige dramas, tales of complicated blood ties have cast a harsh, exhausting shadow across the cultural zeitgeist. These tend to come packaged as festival-friendly reimaginings of a filmmaker’s personal experiences, possessing emotional tugs and intergenerational conflict in spades. You can only watch so many rehashings of Hereditary or Lady Bird before the existential dread stems from knowing there’s two hours of runtime left in the microwave reheating their nachos.
Sophy Romvari, however, would like a word on that matter. With her directorial debut Blue Heron, the Toronto filmmaker has carved a diamond in a thematic mine thought to be long over-extracted of its cinematic potential. Far more indebted to John Cassavetes than Ari Aster—although Aftersun’s similar recontextualizing of childhood memories undeniably makes it the film’s closest sibling—Romvari’s film draws a novel portrait of the ghosts populating our memories long after they have left our lives.
As her family resettles from Hungary to Vancouver Island alongside her three brothers in the 1990s, eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven) observes her parents’ struggle to manage her older brother Jeremy’s steadily destructive conduct. The family’s new home feels perfectly fit to satisfy the six-person unit with its blooming nature, trampoline, and surrounding open space, yet concerns over their well-being arise as Jeremy becomes increasingly unpredictable.
Jeremy is framed as a nearly mythological subject, a troubled young man who no one ever really understood. Sporting a pair of oversized glasses, the teenager towers over his younger siblings, a quietly devastating presence courtesy of newcomer actor Edik Beddoes. Many of Sasha’s memories associated with Jeremy’s turmoil are inherently spotty, listening to conversations from the other side of the door, peeking at conflict from a window, spotting him in between the plants. From shoplifting to potential suggestions of self-harm, Jeremy’s misbehavior holds all the signs of a cry for help from a boy unable to sustain the growing pains of fourteen. It’s the type of understated performance that’s brilliant in its sheer brevity, capturing the invisibility he feels from everyone around him.
This concept on its own already holds richness and noteworthy insights aplenty, largely due to Romvari’s eye for conceiving imagery haunted by nostalgia and incomplete memory. Yet the film’s ingeniousness reveals itself around the halfway point, the central story fully reared on its head to make way for a new narrative device altogether. As Sasha’s mom discusses Jeremy’s relocation over the phone, the film flips to the present day. “Maybe with someone else he could be a superstar,” says Sasha’s mother on the phone with her now adult daughter (Amy Zimmer), who is making a film to better comprehend the societal and familial failures that resulted in Jeremy being taken to foster care.
This older Sasha, clearly bearing the emotional weight of carefully reobserving her childhood with grown-up glasses, makes for a fascinating stand-in for Romvari herself. She interviews social workers about the case, revisits locations in Vancouver Island, and discusses her difficult reflections with others. These scenes bravely shed an additional layer of intimacy, blunt without sacrificing nuance. Gone is the wall of personal distance that fiction tends to provide.
Romvari’s greatest asset is her fully realized point of view, one capturing carefully drawn out reflections that feel unique to her identity as a storyteller. Many of her short work’s thematic ambitions and deep specificity now arrive full-fledged in Blue Heron. Her acclaimed short Still Processing appears to be a major touchstone for Heron’s larger dive into the unreliability of memory and the revelations offered by the camera.
The film begins and ends with Sasha’s phone camera recording the same roads her family traversed to reach their new home. It’s an image that now holds a breathtaking degree of meaning, the ultimate test of Romvari’s ability to reassess the significance of what’s shown. “I struggle now to remember much of my childhood. It only comes back to me in small fragments, and even those memories are hard to trust. I do remember his maps,” says Sasha when this recording first appears. The very same pencil-drawn maps decorate the film’s credits. These acts of love and remembrance guide every scene in Blue Heron, small yet intentional, specific yet piercingly resonant because of the earnestness with which they capture the experience of loving someone who remains at a distance. Dedicating a film is a sweet endeavor. Making one as an attempt to understand and immortalize a loved one left unseen by the world takes immeasurable courage. It’s the kind of empathy that the moving image is built to strive for.
Grade: A-
This review is from the 69th San Francisco International Film Festival. Blue Heron is currently in select theaters from Janus Films.
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