Blue Heron
Re-examining Childhood Trauma
A collection of family memories plays out like a montage of home video footage in Sophy Romvari’s deeply personal feature debut.
A Hungarian family newly arrived in Vancouver Island must navigate the adjustment for their children to the new environment. For the youngest children Sasha (Eylul Guven) and her brothers this comes quite naturally as they enjoy their beachside town with playful frolicking and quickly making friends with the neighbours, but it is the older stepbrother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) who is exhibiting troubling antagonistic behaviour. An almost always silent Jeremy spends his time lying flat on the front porch which the neighbours mistake him for being dead, Jeremy also disappears throughout the day sometimes just hanging around with strangers, other times being picked up by the police for shoplifting. We soon learn from the anguish of the mother and father played by Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa that this has been a continuing struggle with Jeremy that seems to be worsening. No one can get a handle on what exactly Jeremy is rebelling against or how much more dangerous his behaviour could get, most importantly there doesn’t seem to be the right form of care available to try and understand him. This leads to the parents making a difficult decision about whether to have Jeremy taken away.
The film takes a bold shift hallway through where these memories are being revisited through home movie footage by an adult Sasha played by Amy Zimmer, now a filmmaker working on a project to attempt to understand what her brother was going through. This takes an analytical approach to what we have just witnessed as Sasha reflects and investigates her past. One of the film’s most crucial moments comes when Sasha meets with a group of child psychology experts who are reading Jeremy’s case to offer their opinion about what kind of support could have made a difference.
For writer, director Sophy Romvari, Blue Heron has a deep-rooted autobiographical essence which has previously been explored in her short film Still Processing (2020). The film is shot with a precise soft ambience of intense close ups from a child’s eye view; there is a fractured quality to the camera where nothing is quite in full perception which comes to epitomise the fallibility of memory that Romvari is exploring. Not all of Sasha’s memories of Jeremy are traumatic and there were always glimpses of Jeremy's tenderness towards the family, but the lasting impression only becomes one of alienation. From Sasha’s perspective we are only seeing portions of the truth, with one scene where the camera is focused only on the mother’s hands as she prepares dinner and has a delicate conversation with Sasha about Jeremy, which becomes one of the most emotive pieces of hand acting I have ever seen.
There is an intimate therapeutic conversation the director is having with herself here, which manifests quite literally on screen, as the conflicting emotions of these memories are mixed with joy, pain, resentment, hatred, and mournful as Sasha grapples with trying to empathise with her brother’s mental state and her parent’s action, while also overcoming the deep hurt she feels by what has been left from her brother. The film makes note to how under resourced the social care needs were for this family which comes as a warning cry to the future protection of young people suffering from similar unrecognised mental health conditions.
In the back of all this, it’s hard not to think about Charlotte Wells’ breakout film Aftersun (2022), which similarly explored the last moments a daughter spent with her father, or another more recent example of memory cinema is Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow (2025). The similarities are obvious, but the outcome is its own singular achievement. Blue Heron is a sombre but complex in its artistry which Romvari pulls off with subjective brilliance, an eluding tragedy quietly forming in the air which gradually overwhelms you like an oncoming storm. Introspective filmmaking at its most vulnerable and wise.
If Well’s movie was asking the question, ‘What was he going through?’ And Davis Jr’s film was asking ‘What did he do for us?’ Romvari is asking ‘What could we have done to help him?’
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