“Thank you for the memories. They’re all that I have now.”
This line, at the beginning of Sophy Romvari’s feature film debut “Blue Heron,” offers the perfect encapsulation of what you’re about to see. Although, you don’t know quite how perfect until later.
“Blue Heron” is based on Romvari’s 2020 documentary short “Still Processing,” which follows her and her family as they process unresolved feelings of grief surrounding the deaths of her two older brothers. The short never explicitly states how Romvari’s brothers passed, instead focusing on her and her family’s feelings in the aftermath, playing out as she discovers old photographs and film that her parents hid after the fact.
If “Still Processing” is a treatise on the intersection between memory and grief, “Blue Heron” pushes that concept forward and morphs it into a memory play of sorts, one that ruminates on the fragility and fickleness of memory, and then tries to confront that head on. The film begins as something fairly familiar, ostensibly dealing in coming of age conventions we’ve seen before. But, its originality becomes apparent gradually and then all at once. In its latter half, Romvari recontextualizes what you’ve already seen and rips your heart out in the process.
“Blue Heron” stars Eylul Guven as Sasha, the 8-year-old daughter and youngest of four of an immigrant Hungarian family who have just moved to Vancouver Island in the 1990s. As the family tries to settle into a routine that summer, Sasha’s older brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) starts to behave in increasingly erratic and strange ways, throwing her parents into a never-ending cycle of doctors and specialists, all with only theories about what’s wrong.
In its first half, “Blue Heron” lures you into a false sense of familiarity. It has some of the trappings of a coming-of-age movie, but if you pay close enough attention, you’ll notice the film’s edges have a different texture. So many films that deal in the perspective of children force us to live in that perspective, and “Blue Heron” certainly has moments like that – in one scene, Sasha and her brothers stand in the blood red light of her father’s dark room while her parents argue in the other room, their voices muffled through the doorway.
The latter half of the film introduces us to adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer), a fact that would normally be an indication that everything we saw before was filtered through young Sasha’s eyes – and moments like the one in the dark room track with that logic. But, for as much time as we spend with Sasha, for as often as we see the world through her, we spend a significant amount of time in moments where Sasha is nowhere to be found – where it would be impossible for her to have a clear memory of what unfolded.
That feeling – the feeling of remembering something you couldn’t possibly, or contradictory moments you can’t quite square – is what “Blue Heron” aims to capture. The film itself is made up of a collection of shots defined by their barriers. In one moment, Sasha watches Jeremy get arrested through a camera lens. In another, as Jeremy lays outside, unmoving on the front stoop, we stay outside with him as the camera pans across the house, watching its inhabitants and their reactions to Jeremy’s behavior from a distance.
In the latter half of the film, adult Sasha finds herself trying to reach across these barriers, to make sense of why Jeremy was the way he was. She holds meetings with medical professionals where she gives them the details of Jeremy’s case and asks them what they would have done differently with hindsight. She talks to people who knew Jeremy, both old caseworkers and old friends, trying to hold both her good and bad memories of him in the same space, and squaring both of those things with reality. Much like “Still Processing,” we are not given too many specifics on what happened to Jeremy after that initial summer. Instead, we watch Sasha confront her memories – the ones we just watched unfold – directly. Romvari’s decision to allow Sasha that opportunity is one of the most striking devices “Blue Heron” has to offer.
In an early scene, young Sasha sits with her mother (Iringó Réti) on the bed. Her mom can’t stop thinking about Jeremy. “Why do you think he’s like this?” she asks Sasha. She repeats herself, and Sasha says, slightly exasperated: “I don’t know, mom.”
This is the question that’s been ringing in Sasha’s mind over the years – the one she wasn’t able to grasp as a child, and, now that she’s older, still finds hanging frustratingly out of reach. There are no definitive answers, and that’s the real heartbreak. All we’re left with are our memories, and those are as shaky as can be.
“Blue Heron” opens in theaters this weekend.
