Movies should be better than most art forms at capturing and evoking memories, yet as Blue Heron delicately demonstrates, the past always seems to elude us, no matter what tools we bring to bear on it.
The feature debut of Canadian writer-director Sophy Romvari, Blue Heron cleverly tries to remember a young woman’s childhood—and, in particular, her troubled older brother—in two ways. The movie’s first half is a fairly familiar, if finely observed, family drama, in which a girl named Sasha (Eylul Guven) quietly observes her parents’ struggle to manage and help their teenage son Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), whose increasing bursts of defiance suggest some sort of psychological disorder. Then, for its second half, Blue Heron shifts to the perspective of the adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer), now a filmmaker trying to piece together her memories of those years by reviewing old photos and video recordings, as well as meeting with social workers and child psychologists in search of retroactive answers.
Romvari imbues both halves with their own observational elegance, at once soft and searing. She has a knack for the incisive, off-kilter image: a shot from the dark inside of the moving truck as the family arrives at their new home, a single horizontal slit of light at the bottom of the door; a close-up of a bowl of potatoes as we listen to Sasha’s mother (Iringó Réti) tell her that she can’t have a friend over for dinner because Jeremy might embarrass her; the blurred, doubled reflection of the parents in a mirror as they meet with a social worker, a symbol of the movie’s attempt and overall failure to visually reproduce memories that will explain everything.
Eventually, Blue Heron begins to blend past and present even more fantastically. There is a strange, disorienting scene in which the adult Sasha appears at the door of her childhood home, presenting herself to her parents—who appear at the same age as when she was a girl—as a social worker. During the visit, the adult Sasha sees her younger self and whispers something in her ear. Astute viewers of astonishing debuts may be reminded of Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun here, yet the two films are crucially different. Aftersun collapses past and present like a hammer in its final moments (it’s a movie from which I’m still recovering), while Blue Heron gently leans into the convergence of timelines as it goes on. Both are masterfully imagined attempts to wrangle their various memories, even as such memories slip, like grains of sand, through their hands.
(5/8/2026)
