Sasha (Eylul Guven) is the family's youngest daughter of a Hungarian-Canadian clan of six.Supplied
Blue Heron
Written and directed by Sophy Romvari
Starring Eylul Guven, Amy Zimmer and Edik Beddoes
Classification N/A; 91 minutes
Opens in select theatres April 24
Critic’s Pick
At first, life seems simple for the family at the heart of Blue Heron, Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s remarkable and formally daring drama, one of the strongest directorial debuts to come along in some time.
A Hungarian-Canadian clan of six, the family is settling into a new house on Vancouver Island in the late 1990s. There are peaceful dinners inside the cramped but warm home, trampoline bounces and water-balloon fights in the yard, so much boisterous but cheerful yelling. And there is the family’s youngest daughter Sasha (Eylul Guven) quietly positioning herself in the midst of it all, cannily recording moments with the family’s camcorder as if she is preparing a historical document whose significance she cannot quite comprehend in the current moment.
There is also the one member of the family who enters Sasha’s frame with a destabilizing, furious force. Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) is the eldest child, and also the most challenging. At first, it is unclear what is troubling the tall, lanky, bespectacled teenager – the film introduces him as moody and sullen, but not so far removed from any teenage boy.
But then Jeremy’s moments of rancour and disturbance accumulate – what is he doing on the roof? – to the point that he’s being escorted home by the police. What is wrong with Jeremy? It becomes increasingly clear that the family, including Sasha’s overburdened parents (Iringo Reti and Adam Tompa) have no real idea as to the answer, or even how to bide their time until a potential solution comes along, which, given that it’s the ‘90s and social service officials aren’t equipped or educated with the exact language of contemporary mental health, won’t come along for decades. The cracks begin to widen, the stresses add up, and everything quietly falls apart.
For the first two thirds of Romvari’s film, the director delivers a thoroughly intimate excavation of a family disintegrating before our eyes. The young performers are all exceptionally strong, especially Beddoes, who must keep Jeremy on the fringes of the story, yet ensure that his tremulous presence is felt in every single frame.
Sometimes captured from Sasha’s naive perspective, sometimes shot as if a stranger had smuggled themselves into the family’s home, curious and voracious, the film feels personal and deeply felt. Almost as if Romvari is piecing together her own childhood memories, hazy but intensely impactful. Which is exactly why the audacious third act of Blue Heron works so brilliantly, not only elevating the drama that comes before it but recontextualizing and reinterpreting it to profound effect.
Without spoiling too much, the film abruptly fast-forwards to the present day, with an adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer), now a filmmaker, in the midst of developing a project about Jeremy. The years have not been kind to Sasha’s family, but by investigating the contours of her childhood, and just how Jeremy’s instability shaped and frequently malformed them, maybe some kind of peace can be found. To say nothing of art.
Jeremy (Edik Beddos), the eldest child, with sister Sasha.Blue Fox Entertainment Canada/Supplied
But to truly dig into her past, Sasha must engage in a kind of metaphorical time travel, a looping revisitation of her childhood that will surely cause some moviegoers to wonder just what is going on – whether they have briefly, accidentally fallen asleep and woken up in an entirely new reality. Quickly, though, Romvari proves herself to be in complete control of her narrative. While gently taking the hand of her audience, perhaps in the same way that Sasha perhaps hoped she could have held onto Jeremy, the filmmaker walks us through the haze of memory and the guilt of regret to emerge in a more hopeful, beautiful space.
In another director’s hands, the highly fraught approach could have collapsed unto itself, imploding everything that came before it. Yet Romvari – who has mined similar themes in her acclaimed short films, though not with this degree of formal inventiveness – maintains a rigorous cinematic discipline that keeps the entire work airtight. Ultimately, Blue Heron is an epic exploring the power and fissures of memory. But there is no chance that audiences will ever forget what Romvari has accomplished here.