‘Blue Heron’ Review: A Quiet, Devastating Study of Family, Memory, and Pain

The question is one many parents ask themselves—and, eventually, siblings, relatives, friends, acquaintances. It could be a simple “why,” but it carries a thousand possible answers and an infinite number of doubts. In a way, that question becomes a constant act of revisiting, of rewinding time in search of an origin, a reason—something that might help contain so much anguish. In Sophy Romvari’s debut feature, the mystery is never resolved. Instead, it is traced, shaped, given cinematic life, as if that gesture alone might offer a way into the enigma.

Blue Heron is a deeply autobiographical film that centers, at least initially, on the life of a Hungarian immigrant family in Canada: a couple and their four children. There is the eldest, Jeremy (from the mother’s previous relationship), then two boys, Felix and Henry, and finally Sasha, the youngest, whose perspective the film quietly adopts. Their parents have moved them to the outskirts of Vancouver, and despite the apparent calm and natural beauty of the setting, something feels off.

It soon becomes clear that Jeremy is troubled. Withdrawn and largely silent, he drifts between total isolation and sudden bursts of aggression, as if trying to be seen. His parents don’t quite know what to do—either to help him or to mend their relationship with him. It’s evident they’ve tried everything, and nothing has worked. Jeremy lashes out, gets into trouble, hurts himself and others. And there seems to be no way of understanding what drives him, no way of making him articulate whatever it is that consumes him. The “experts” have their theories and prescriptions, but nothing changes.

Romvari unfolds this trajectory in a lyrical register, filtering events through Sasha’s gaze—the youngest, who observes without fully grasping the gravity of what’s happening. For her, it almost becomes part of the fabric of everyday life, to the point that she cannot understand why her mother won’t let her invite her new friends over to play or have dinner. Awarded at the Locarno Film Festival, Blue Heron shares an evident kinship with La Ciénaga, Lucrecia Martel’s landmark debut, which similarly approaches family tensions through an impressionistic observation of children, adolescents, and adults.

Romvari resists amplifying the drama in conventional narrative terms. The opaque, seemingly irrational nature of Jeremy’s actions could easily be shaped into suspense, but the filmmaker chooses a gentler, more intimate approach—one rooted in the gaze of someone watching with a mixture of concern, fear, and tenderness. We witness the parents slowly losing strength in their struggle—especially the mother, who begins to unravel—and what lingers is less anxiety than anguish, less fear than helplessness.

At the same time, the film dwells on details, often observed from a distance, through windows, or from adjacent rooms. Set in the late 1990s, its sense of time is almost tactile: the bulky computers with their rudimentary drawing programs, the television commercials of the era, the textures of domestic life. Romvari lets the camera linger—on children playing by the shore, on a mother peeling potatoes for a home-cooked meal, on Jeremy staring into nothingness, as if absorbed by some private and unfathomable world.

Midway through, the Canadian filmmaker—whose acclaimed short films also explore autobiographical terrain—introduces a striking temporal leap and a formal shift. The film moves toward a kind of poetic pseudo-documentary, reflecting on and interrogating that past. It feels, in a sense, like a metaphorical rendering of the very process Romvari herself may have undergone: revisiting her own history in order to reshape it into cinema.

And while this turn might suggest a more distant, reflective mode, Blue Heron ultimately regains its emotional force. Past and present converge, and the characters—then and now—continue trying to understand what happened, what they might have done differently, where they went wrong. Once again, there are no answers. What remains, perhaps, is cinema itself: a medium, a bridge between past and present, between the pain of then and the lingering anguish of now.