Blue Heron Review

Sophy Romvari's Astounding Debut Travels the Long and Painful Road Towards Acceptance

By: Marc Kozak

Blue Heron

Sophy Romvari's Astounding Debut Travels the Long and Painful Road Towards Acceptance

By: Marc Kozak

Most movies about troubled teenagers are told from the perspective of the actual troubled teenager, allowing the viewer to attempt to enter the headspace of someone going through a tough time as it’s happening. It’s a decision that makes a lot of narrative sense, but it’s also a bit of wish fulfillment on the part of the filmmaker – maybe we, as adults, can look back on the feelings and struggles we had as younger people and finally make some sense out of it all with the gift of hindsight and lived experience.

Alternatively, you could make the same movie from the parent’s perspective and showcase how painful it can be to try and survive as a young force of chaos constantly upends any attempt at familial equilibrium. It’s an approach that instantly garners empathy from an adult audience, most of whom have lived through their own challenging experiences as parents.

One of the many clever magic tricks in Sophy Romvari’s spellbinding debut feature Blue Heron is the utilization of a third and rarely used perspective – one that isn’t protagonist or antagonist. We see a family going through a major crisis through the eyes of a sibling that the story isn’t really happening to, a young girl who is a bystander to the drama but still deeply affected by what’s going on, even if she doesn’t really understand it at the time. Based on Romvari’s own real-life experiences, Blue Heron is her attempt to piece together hazy childhood memories and come to some kind of understanding and acceptance. It’s a formally bold and profoundly moving piece of art that defies easy categorization, even as it effortlessly provides a universal access point of empathy for those of us who have lived through difficult childhoods and parenthoods.

The movie opens as eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven) moves to Vancouver Island with her three brothers in the 1990s. Her father (Ádám Tompa) is constantly busy with work on his giant computer, leaving her mother (Iringó Réti) to look after and entertain the children. As the family slowly starts to grow accustomed to a new home, a new school, and new neighbors, we start to get a sense that the eldest brother, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), is having the toughest time adapting. He is a tall and awkwardly lanky teenager with Coke-bottle glasses, silently grinning as he pokes at his siblings and recklessly interacts with any object in sight like some kind of mischievous cat.

" Blue Heron effortlessly provides a universal access point of empathy for those of us who have lived through difficult childhoods and parenthoods. "

Romvari lovingly populates this new family home with impeccable period-appropriate details, likely taken directly from her own childhood. The sounds are the typical sounds of an ordinary suburban home – a lawn mower in the distance, kids squealing as they run through the sprinkler, a television or radio softly humming the news of the day. It’s a perfectly mundane backdrop that could’ve belonged to any of us, and one that you’d never suspect to be a breeding ground for the intense pain and sadness that follows.

Sasha helps her mother with the cooking and makes friends with a group of girls in the neighborhood, but even she can sense that something is wrong. Jeremy starts to act up more and more, wandering off during a trip to the beach without telling anyone where he’s going, defiantly throwing a ball loudly against a wall despite his parents’ protests, stealing small objects from local stores. Sasha peeks around corners and catches muffled glimpses of worried conversations between her parents – various professionals have been consulted in an attempt to understand Jeremy’s increasingly concerning behavior. It’s not a surprise when a policeman eventually brings him home in handcuffs one day, leading to even more violent and dangerously impulsive outbursts. Things are at a breaking point, and Jeremy’s worried parents don’t know what to do next.

Even though it might not feel like it initially, Romvari doesn’t waste a single shot – a lot of the time spent with Sasha and the family doing seemingly trivial things ends up providing significant context to the person that Sasha becomes as an adult. We see her develop a fascination with the hand-drawn maps of the town that Jeremy quietly draws in his room, giving her an early appreciation for art. Her father follows the kids around with a camcorder, documenting their activities in a way that interests Sasha. When the police show up with Jeremy, her father hands her the camera and she instinctively begins to film what’s going on, the first work of a future filmmaker.

The line between fiction and reality begins to blur even more as the narrative suddenly shifts to twenty years in the future, as an adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer) appears to be in the early stages of making the very movie that we’re watching. She gives Jeremy’s story to a group of social workers and psychologists and asks them for their feedback, wondering if there’s anything anyone could’ve done differently at the time. It’s Romvari’s polite indictment of the social services system, as she was witness to a parade of various professionals coming and going during Jeremy’s childhood, all without providing any kind of relief or solution. We see Jeremy’s parents struggling to figure out where they went wrong, feeling as if they are responsible for Jeremy’s pain even though no one can tell them exactly what that pain is or how it started. Romvari brings in real social workers and films them documentary-style in this scene, hoping they can speak for themselves and give some kind of answer with 20 years of hindsight. It’s even more devastating when you realize there are still no answers – it appears that there really is no one to blame, but these things still happened, highlighting the futility of a governmental system full of well-intentioned but often equally helpless professionals.

And this is Blue Heron’s final lesson – what happened, happened, and there isn’t anything that can be done to change it. The final scene is another formal trick that I won’t spoil here, but it hits with devastating impact. Even with years of exploration, analysis, and internal questioning, there still aren’t any answers to why terrible things happen. When you’re in the moment, you can do everything you can and get the best help available, but things won’t always turn out for the best. Romvari could have chosen to finish the movie on a note of rage or despair, but instead she chooses compassion and forgiveness.

“Time is going backwards,” Sasha’s father says as he films his children sprinkling each other with flour in the kitchen. “It’s a time warp.” Romvari has created a spectacular photo album of sorts with Blue Heron, transforming her own memories and unique perspective into a method of accepting the circumstances that made her who she is today. There will always be guilt and pain, but with greater understanding comes forgiveness, and eventually, comfort. Blue Heron marks the arrival of a major new talent, and it’s easily one of the best movies of 2026.