Sophy Romvari has used cinema to mine the fractured, seemingly incomplete nature of her family history since her first short film, Nine Behind. In that film and others, whatever pieces of physical archive might elude her, she makes up for in a rigorous but soulful exploration of the archive of memory, so stories and artifacts compete and merge to form an imperfect picture.
Now, after nearly a decade of short films under her belt, Romvari finally debuts a feature, Blue Heron, that advances her approach to reconstructing, confronting, and reconciling the gaps in her, and her family’s, story — albeit this time in a fictional context. Set in the late 1990s, it follows a Canadian-Hungarian family’s uneasy move to Vancouver Island, during which the parents struggle to deal with their eldest son, Jeremy’s (Edik Beddoes), increasingly worrisome behavior.
Formed mostly through the eyes of the family’s youngest daughter, Sasha (Eylul Guven), our impression of Jeremy is not one of strained pathology, but constant empathy. Sasha’s curious gaze is often mediated — by closed doors, windows, physical distance, emotional maturity, or the lens of a video camera — though her perspective never feels wanting. In fact, the distance of Romvari’s camera, at once admiring and wary, is a meaningful way to observe this troubled family, for the film’s strengths lie in implication and ellipsis, not in explication. Jeremy may not be the father’s biological son, he may or may not have tried to end his life by cutting himself, and he may be beyond “saving,” but Romvari never deigns to instruct the viewer. Instead, what Romvari prizes is the bond — borne out of silent emotional and gestural exchanges — between Sasha and Jeremy.
Their bond is in sharp relief to Jeremy’s relationship to his mother and father. The silence between them festers with low-level threat such that even fleeting moments of peaceful release and shared joy — one evening the whole family engages in solitary artistic pursuits that become communal — nevertheless twinge with unspoken tension. The mother and father’s desire for a diagnosis of Jeremy’s condition is the human need for closure. Therapists and counselors struggle to fulfill that need, offering assessments that are ultimately incomplete and unhelpful, so the distance between them grows to a seemingly impassable gulf.
Until the halfway point, Blue Heron appears to be a handsomely mounted drama, sharply rendered in thoughtful period detail and moving performances of varying emotional registers. But this is a Sophy Romvari film, so form and style were never likely to be treated in such straightforward ways. Set 20 years in the future, the second half of Blue Heron is full of formal revelations and grace notes that are worth keeping a mystery; but one, which happens during an early scene after this forward temporal leap, is worth elucidating.
At this point in the film, the question of how much of herself Romvari is going to inject into the proceedings starts to scratch underneath the surface. Sasha, now an adult, is a filmmaker who has gathered a group of social workers to discuss a case study for a young man we assume is Jeremy. Amidst a stream of despondent non-answers and partial explanations (“It’s hard to predict… it’s hard to tell”), one miniscule shot, a seemingly insignificant cutaway of a hand turning a camera on its tripod, disrupts the scene’s familiar form. There’s no explicit reference to this little cinematic secret, but there is an illogic to its place within the scene — for it can’t have been done by Sasha — that immediately suggests Romvari’s omnipresence in a brand new way, far beyond her role as a director. It’s the kind of intervention by the filmmaking apparatus itself that has guided Romvari’s practice from the very beginning, and which charges the rest of the film with a quiet, tortured ecstasy that guides it as close to a feeling of closure anyone dealing with the unanswerable could hope for.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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