Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
I have always thought households where children outnumber adults are not ideal. In these homes, children must compete for adult attention, and the adults are at risk of burnout. Writer and director Sophy Romvari’s semi-autobiographical debut feature film “Blue Heron” (2025) explores the complications of a child-skewed family from the perspective of 8-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), the youngest of four children who witnesses her parents struggle to manage their oldest son’s increasingly impulsive and dangerous behavior.
“Blue Heron” is also a period piece about a Hungarian family’s immigration to Canada during one summer in the 1990s. Stories about immigration often grapple with feelings of being displaced from one’s home country, unmoored in one’s adopted country and finding solace among one’s relatives. Romvari subverts the expectations of the genre by alienating her protagonist from family life.
Before we’re introduced to Sasha, the establishing shots provide a tour of the natural beauty of her family’s new home on Vancouver Island. Isn’t the water so blue and the land so green, serene and inviting? Alas, the beauty of nature is a poor salve for psychological suffering.
When the focus shifts, two of Sasha’s brothers — Henry and Felix — content themselves with horseplay while she watches her parents unload the contents of the moving van. Already, the shot from inside the van frames Sasha as the outsider looking in. Then there is Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), the eldest brother who, with his blond hair and pale complexion in contrast to everyone else’s dark hair and olive skin, appears to be the odd man out of the well-matched set.
Summer is a convenient time to relocate because it does not disrupt the children’s schooling. Although three-fourths of her children are enjoying the unstructured time, Sasha’s mother is exhausted from providing childcare while her father works — or appears to work. When Sasha’s mother gets a rare evening off (or so we think), her father lets Sasha play with Microsoft Paint and demonstrates the ins and outs of developing film in their dark room. As the children look on in awe at the print, their father says film is a way to time travel. His constant photographing and filming is also how he stays present but never at the center of the action; a preference which serves as another strain on his marriage. Although Sasha grows to share her father’s love of film, it is a meager inheritance — one she will use to revisit her childhood and reconcile her confused feelings about being overshadowed by Jeremy’s problems.
Indeed, it is Jeremy who is always pulling focus from everyone else. He is played exceptionally well by newcomer Beddoes, who is tasked with making his sweet moments as sincere as the menacing ones. At first, Jeremy’s stunts, such as disappearing during a nature outing and playing dead on the front porch, appear to be mere adolescent rebellion. As his behavior escalates, his parents are at a loss for how to intervene. After a police officer brings Jeremy home after he is caught shoplifting, Sasha’s mother explains that she can no longer have friends over because their neighbors may learn the extent of their problems. He is an inscrutable figure who is spontaneous and fun and places constraints on their family’s time and energy.
“Blue Heron” is concerned with memory — and Romvari’s artful direction, aided by cinematographer Maya Bankovic, is a key part of the storytelling. As the camera swings from sweeping wide shots to extreme closeups, the perspective switch gives the audience a sense of Sasha’s point-of-view. As she eavesdrops on conversations, the film puts the viewer in her shoes: What else is childhood if not a temporary yet consequential life stage full of thinking we see the bigger picture without quite knowing how the small details fit together? The languid way the camera pans across the action evokes the way sunlight and heat seem to last forever during the dog days of summer, and how sadness ensues as the season fades.
Although the first half of the film centers on the summer of the family’s relocation and Jeremy’s escalating troubles, there is a time jump that propels us to the present. Even though the opening voiceover states this is a story about making sense of past events that affect the present, the narrative shift feels rather jarring. It also made me identify with Sasha, as I began to miss the family that I spent so much in-universe time with.
“Blue Heron” raises many questions about how to grieve the loss of childhood innocence, but not all of them are answered. We’re asked to trust that emotional revelations will unfold like a memory — slowly, unevenly and perhaps not at all.