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A shoo-in for any ‘best of the year’ list (including ours), Sophy Romvari’s debut film is a stop-you-in-your tracks debut about Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), a young man with oppositional defiant disorder, and the parents who struggle to support him. The Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker makes good on her early promise – her graduate film premiered at TIFF in 2020 – with a clever and poignant portrait of a family stuck in an impossible situation. It’s inspired by her own memories and you can sense it. Every frame broils with feeling.
An obvious point of reference is Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin – and Lionel Shriver’s source novel – which charted the slow descent into despair for the parents of a troubled child. Blue Heron is a gentler, kinder film, introspectively exploring the nature of memory and the idea that trauma twists and manipulates it like heat warping a strip of celluloid.
Set amid the Spielbergian suburbs and pine coves of Canada’s Vancouver Island in the early ’90s, it follows an unnamed immigrant Hungarian family as they settle into their new life. The isolation that comes with being a ferry ride from the mainland is quickly magnified by their increasing sense of being left to manage an impossible situation alone. Their son’s erratic behaviour has the police at the door and their neighbours twitching their curtains. Things are smashed. At one point, he climbs onto the roof and threatens to jump. He keeps gasoline in his bedroom and threatens to burn the house down.
Every frame broils with feeling
Pained and haunted, these two parents (Iringó Réti and Adam Tompa) are drowning and your heart breaks for them. They love Jeremy, just as they love the eight-year-old Sasha and her two brothers, but appreciate that on some deeper level, he might be a threat to them. Social services have only the most blunt solution: to take him into care.
Jeremy is played by the street-cast Beddoes with an otherworldly energy that cuts right through the rhythms of family life. Bespectacled, inscrutable and mostly non-verbal, he’s searched out by cinematographer Maya Bankovic’s slow zooms. What he’s thinking is a mystery. His condition is too. There are no easy solutions and Romvari doesn’t look for them.
The meta ending brings a remarkable new perspective. The now-adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer) travels back in time to visit her family in 1990s – even interacting tearfully with her own younger self – to try to absorb what she missed at the time. Memory is slippery and trauma can create a false impression of what really happened. It’s a bold and moving message from a powerful film.
In UK and Ireland cinemas now.