Sophy Romvari’s movies are slippery things. The Canadian filmmaker already has something of a cult following among very-online cinephiles despite only just having made her debut feature. The film, Blue Heron, is a sun-bleached portrait of a dysfunctional family of six, told through a series of hazy pre-millennial memories following their migration from Hungary. The territory isn’t exactly new for Romvari, whose short films – notably 2020’s Still Processing and Remembrance of József Romvári as well as Nine Behind (2016) – also employ her family history to establish a cinematic space between docufiction, autobiography and fantasy.
But the new film, which premiered last month to near-unanimous critical praise in Locarno (where it also scooped up the First Feature Award) is the broadest, most detailed realisation of her ideas yet. Shot by Maya Bankovic on location in Vancouver Island, each frame is cool-toned yet resplendent: lush, measured landscapes that express a penchant for studied angles and complementary colours. In this reconstructed fictionalisation of a life, the images are striking and often surprising, staged with the sensibility of a curious documentarian.
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Blue Heron is titled after a bird that, one diegetic nature programme tells us, has an increasingly weaker bond with its children relative to their age. Troubled teen Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) is the older brother of Henry (Liam Serg), Felix (Preston Drabble), and the eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), Romvari’s self-insert through whose perspective the story is primarily told.
Their parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa) struggle to control Jeremy – the only child of the four from their mother’s first marriage – as the ways in which he acts out become more and more concerning. Lanky, sullen, and mostly non-verbal, Jeremy’s attitude swings wildly between cautiously playful and willfuly destructive. He disappears for extended periods and shoplifts, pretends to be dead on the front steps, punches his bare fist through a window pane in the middle of the night; he skulks over the roof of the house and occasionally threatens to burn it down.
The professionals they consult are unable to provide a diagnosis, or really any actionable guidance, though they note Jeremy shows signs of Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD): a condition that encompasses a pattern of anger and irritability toward parents and other authority figures, as well as spiteful, revenge-seeking behaviour. “My mom used to say there’s no movie that gets at what we went through, and that planted a seed in me very young to make the movie that she wished existed then,” Romvari told The Globe and Mail in August, noting that at a young age she absorbed the “aesthetic desires” of her parents, who had a great affection for art but, “as immigrants, were not practising artists.”
In the film, her father tenderly documents the antics of his young children, keeping a camcorder trained on them as they bounce on trampolines and play in the sprinklers, shrieking with delight. Her mother directs the blame for Jeremy’s actions inward: “Maybe it was me,” she says over the phone, as the narrative takes a turn for the formally experimental around its halfway mark. “Maybe, with someone else, he would be a superstar.”
The film then dips into a timeline involving an older version of Sasha (Amy Zimmer), who also narrates the first scene — a Virgin Suicides-esque introduction that also uses an omniscient narrator and overlays a series of white sketches, in this case several maps that were hand-drawn by Romvari’s own brother. Blue Heron is rich in these kinds of nostalgic flourishes, almost avant garde in its meticulous attention to sensory detail. Despite feeling like a fairly typical genre exercise in some ways, it’s a film that resists easy answers and categorisation. Contemporary cinematic works like this are only made possible when the stars align in terms of funding, talent, a degree of luck, and a singular vision.
The proposition behind Blue Heron is a deceptively simple one – that childhood memories have a texture, that your personal history is really a series of incomplete dreams. So, would you like to sit with some of them here and now, in the dark?