blue heron

Blue Heron (2025)
Directed by Sophy Romvari

My memories of childhood are fading . At 37, I find myself rarely reflecting on the positive moments of my youth, and instead dwell on the traumatic. But there are moments, as I saunter through the memory museum of my mind, where I can seize hold of quiet, unassuming glimpses of subdued benevolence. I suppose the trick is taking it all in, the good and the unsavory, and realizing that we’re a product of these moments; of an equation that started from the moment we opened our eyes. For some, it’s a math problem comparable to 2+2=4, whereas for others, like myself, it can often seem like quantum mechanics. For Sophy Romvari, looking back at her past through the lens of her camera, her perspective shifts. I know the feeling. When writing about the tumultuous past, whether it be looking at my parents through the lens of childhood versus adulthood or partners that have come and gone, my feelings within the moment can change dramatically depending on where I am within my own life. And while I would enjoy to pick apart and dissect every moment and attempt to create some sort of mental hierarchy wherein everyone that I’ve come in contact with is garnered some fixed, uncompromising value on how they affected my life, the fact is that my feelings are often very mixed. Sometimes people haunt you. And sometimes they don’t. I remain tethered to everyday life, clinging to the comforts of routine. That got disrupted during this move to Seattle, where I’m confronted by how meaningful those routines ended up being, how it brought me closer to the humbling surface of the Earth. My feet no longer quite touch the ground the way they used to, and it’s not just because I climb literal hills daily. And in that way, I reflect on people in my life and how they too may have been disoriented, attempting to find meaning within their own lives.. These moments of tumult can produce a lot of empathy. In Blue Heron, Romvari looks back at her childhood, and the relationship she had with her stepbrother, with a kind of beautiful introspection that I’ve rarely seen captured on film. This is distinctly one of the best and most powerful films of the year so far.

The film observes Sasha (Eylul Guven), an eight-year old living with her three brothers and Hungarian parents as they settle on Vancouver Island in the late 90s. The eldest, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), has been behaving increasingly erratic, with the move signaling a notable spike in his discomfort. He’s quiet, and Romvari’s film rarely offers pronounced explanations on the whys and whences behind Jeremy’s actions. Instead, we see Sasha’s reactions, oftentimes not marked by histrionics, but rather just observing Jeremy’s expressions, which range from humorless and cold to blissfully happy. A notable scene involves Jeremy being escorted home by police. Jeremy’s father goes into his basement bedroom, where Jeremy is tearing his room apart. Jeremy’s father doesn’t necessarily scold him, but asks for an explanation. Nothing is getting through to Jeremy, until his father holds him tight, hugging him as tightly as I’ve ever seen a man hug their son. It’s the first of several times when I teared up watching Blue Heron. It’s a moment of such complete masculine fragility; I often wonder what my childhood, and my life, would have been like if my parents dealt with my own faults, mistakes, and misbehaviors with the same kind of openheartedness. Instead they lashed out with violence, and I harbor great resentment for that reaction. With the children I eventually have, it’ll be this kind of love seen in Blue Heron that I would advocate for.

As the film progresses, we shift from the 90s to the contemporary, where an adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer), now a filmmaker, attempts to deconstruct why her stepbrother acted the way he did, and reconciling her feelings about her parents, who eventually submitted Jeremy to state supervision. She speaks with clinical professionals, who review a dossier of the case, attempting to pinpoint what modern adjustments would be made to analyze Jeremy. In search of answers, the questions just keep piling up. This is where Blue Heron reaches a sort of broadly existential, painfully true moment. Captured beautifully by cinematographer Maya Bankovic, the film’s rich color palette becomes suffused with light, where adult Sasha navigates the temporal space of her past. There’s beauty in the stillness of watching cartoons with your siblings during the summertime, and being an adult, seeing your best self in this way, may be the epitome of catharsis. The answers will never be there. We have our desire to understand it, to make sense of it all, and we have to search for some meaning in that.

There’s a litany of references made throughout the film, and casual reminders of the DNA of other pictures that clearly inspired Romvari, from Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, to Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir pictures, to most recently, Ricky D’Ambrose’s excellent The Cathedral. Yet the poignancy and aching beauty of Romvari’s picture often times registers as a perfect storm of collaborative happenstance. In a Malickian moment, adult Sasha walks with Jeremy, the same Jeremy of her youth, encased in her memory as a perennial teenager. She reads a letter from one of Jeremy’s friends, who confides that he was a gentle soul, and one that found themselves lost to time. The camera pans out to find that Jeremy is no longer there. That’s what walking with ghosts often feels like. They are there, their mental image as vivid as the real thing, conversing with you like there has not been a missing beat. And a moment later, they’re gone, the pain of losing them recreated all the same. Writing about this now, I am flushed with the memories of past childhood friends, ex-lovers, etc. Their memories remain bright fixtures in the light show of my mind. Like a Waxahatchee song, there’s a transparent, completely unabashed, and vividly rendered quality to the way Romvari’s film communicates these ideas. I suppose Daniel Johnston has that same quality too. I cannot advocate for this film enough. It’s a tone poem of the sincerest and affecting and highest quality.