Movie review by Greg Carlson

The movies love to dramatize, to one degree or another, the struggles of mental illness. Major studios are frequently seduced by the prestige potential of both fiction and nonfiction bestsellers on the topic that dangle the possibilities of award season accolades and even Oscar gold. More often than not, those adaptations (and the scores of similarly-themed original screenplays that make it to completion) emphasize conflict that fails to capture a comprehensive sense of the daily/weekly/monthly/yearly grind and quotidian experiences of individuals and families facing unique challenges, mandated interventions and a wide range of painful decisions resulting from a diagnosed or undiagnosed disorder.

In her feature-length debut “Blue Heron,” now available to view in America on the Criterion Channel following its world premiere last year at the Locarno Film Festival (where it received the Swatch First Feature Award), the talented filmmaker Sophy Romvari creates an extraordinary and extraordinarily cinematic evocation of memory and grief. In 2020, the director attracted significant attention for the short documentary “Still Processing,” which addresses a few of the same autobiographical elements used in “Blue Heron.” Romvari, the youngest of four siblings, was born in Victoria, British Columbia not long after her brothers and parents emigrated from Hungary.

Through the eyes of young Sasha (Eylul Guven), “Blue Heron” features a family that corresponds with Romvari’s real one. Set on Vancouver Island, where the filmmaker grew up, the first half of the movie carefully stacks an escalating series of tiny incidents that reveal the many ways in which Sasha and the viewers come to recognize the deep troubles of oldest brother Jeremy (a superb Edik Beddoes). Choosing snippets of overheard conversations rather than dialogue-dependent exposition, Romvari aligns the audience with Sasha in a kid’s-eye-view perspective of a family unraveling.

Following increasingly disturbing behavior that eventually results in a home visit from a social worker, we learn that Jeremy may be exhibiting signs of oppositional defiant disorder. Beddoes brings to his character a quiet menace while earning heartbreaking sympathy. Jeremy’s actions always speak louder than any of his infrequent words; Romvari locates the liminal passageway between Sasha’s love for her brother and the frustration wreaked by his disruptive and antisocial conduct. Some viewers will certainly be reminded of Lynne Ramsay’s astonishing gifts in work like “Die My Love” and especially “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” the latter of which thematically rhymes with “Blue Heron.”

While “We Need to Talk About Kevin” grapples with the toll of unthinkable violence, Romvari’s narrative approach to personal reckoning and reconciliation arrives in the movie’s depiction of Sasha as an adult (played by Amy Zimmer). We connect the dots to Sasha’s formative interactions as a mediamaker, fostered in part by the frequent presence of her father’s camcorder. In a tour de force series of scenes in which we are invited to witness Romvari the artist unpack the trauma of Romvari the daughter/sister, the director hotwires past and present. Operating partially as a kind of metatextual contemplation on the subjective elasticity of both remembrance and imagination, “Blue Heron” soars toward poetry.