Blue Heron

The slipperiness of memory is a common theme in cinema, but it’s rarely been explored more evocatively than in Sophy Romvari’s shattering debut feature, Blue Heron. It sees the filmmaker looking back at a fictional version of her own childhood sometime in the late 1990s. Romvari’s surrogate is Sasha (Eylul Guven), a cheery eight-year-old who’s recently moved with her parents, who are émigrés from Hungary, and three brothers, to a peaceful suburb in British Columbia. It’s an idyllic summer, with trips to the beach, water balloon fights in the garden and lazy days indoors watching cartoons. But there’s a fly in the ointment: Sasha’s oldest brother, Jeremy, a gangly teen with floppy blonde hair and wire-rimmed glasses, who haunts the edges of Blue Heron’s frame. 

Jeremy is a troubled young man, but he seems to have little ability to articulate what ails him. Instead, the darkness within reveals itself in chaotic, unexplained behaviour. Sometimes his erratic conduct is playful, like when he suddenly dusts his giggling brothers in a blizzard of icing sugar. Sometimes it’s expressed as common childhood mischief, like pinching an inexpensive trinket from a museum gift shop. But by the time he’s punching holes in glass windows and walking across their family's steeply pitched roof, we’re far beyond teenage rebellion. 

The parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa), who remain unnamed, are deeply worried about their eldest, but have little idea how to support him. They’ve created a home that could hardly be more loving (the production design of the family’s suburban abode creates one of the cosiest cinematic homes since E.T.), and they’ve consulted psychiatrists and social workers, whose diagnoses and solutions don’t help. 

None of this unfolds in conventional, fully formed scenes. Romvari instead lays out this family crisis drama as a mosaic of fragments that are rich in visual and sonic details – the tapping of keyboard strokes on an old computer, the crunch of sugary cereal in the morning, the rush of cold water from a garden hose on a balmy day – but vague on facts. The haziness is apt: the film isn’t rigidly from Sasha’s point of view, but like any childhood memory, this story is full of ellipses. 

While it’s artfully told, Romvari’s film is a fairly conventional memory piece... until it isn’t. What clinches Blue Heron's brilliance is its audacious narrative structure. With little fanfare, the film switches at the midpoint to Sasha in the present (now played by Amy Zimmer), having seemingly got off the phone with her distraught mother in the past. She’s now a filmmaker in her mid-20s who’s investigating Jeremy’s troubles via cinema – perhaps she’s making the film we’ve been watching. We see her presenting a group of mental health workers with Jeremy’s case notes, to see if the psychoanalytic profession is any closer to answering the mystery of his illness 20 years on, and later she visits the childhood home we’ve just witnessed through fractured memories. The results of these daring formal choices are both thrilling and deeply affecting.

Earlier in the film, while developing a photograph of his boys playing, Sasha’s father observes that the photochemistry process is like “time is going backwards.” Romvari’s filmmaking aspires to something similar. Whether it’s past, present, or some fluid space between the two, she understands that our memories and great cinema operate on similar planes, where reality and imagination collide. A handful of filmmakers have mastered this kind of cinema of consciousness (Alain Resnais, Nic Roeg, Terrence Malick); with this dizzyingly experimental and original work, Romvari wouldn’t be out of place in that lofty company.

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Released 26 Jun by Conic; certificate tbc