Drama • PG • 91 Minutes • 2025
This review may contain spoilers
Sophy Romvari’s beautifully crafted Blue Heron is a delicate and sincere portrayal of a family grappling with the increasingly erratic behaviour of their eldest son, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) and viewed through the eyes of their youngest daughter, Sasha (Eylul Guven). Did you ever grow up with or know a Jeremy? It’s a shorthand that has almost become vernacular from Beddoes’s character as an outsider teen whose unpredictable actions place strain on everyone around him. Yet they’re charming, troubled, and still part of the family. Who knows, maybe you were the Jeremy. Romvari bases the film on her own childhood growing up on Gabriola Island, then moving to Vancouver Island and examines the fallibility of memory in a search for not only the truth but a clearer picture of her own adolescence through the people around her.
Although the film’s surface level is about familial trauma, underneath there is a powerful idea about how memory can distort reality. It’s only when Sasha is older (played by Amy Zimmer) that she realizes what was happening around her — by looking back through time, she analyzes what we remember and if we can even trust those memories. When Zimmer takes hold of Sasha’s character, we see her take in a host of others to create a pool of perspectives in an attempt to round out her own memories and fully realize her older brother. Sasha quite literally goes back in time as the film enters its abstract structure when she poses as a social worker to fully examine the choices her parents made with her brother, asking the hard questions, all in a tremendous example of inquisitive empathy toward them. Yet, having the answers and interrogating the problem, tragedy bleeds when the question is asked: Would anything change if we had gotten there sooner?
Blue Heron pulls one of the most interesting perspective shifts I’ve seen in a long time with a unique filmmaking technique that blurs the lines between documentary and narrative film. Cinematographer Maya Bankovic brings a naturalistic texture to the film and uses slow zooms and internal framing to draw a measured and idyllic snapshot through its silent images, provoking an idea of memory. Romvari’s choice to bend time in on itself and have an older version of Sasha pursue her own interests in film beautifully mirrors Romvari’s personal experience with Sasha’s fictional one. Romvari introduces Sasha’s interest in documentary as a device to help her study the inner workings of her own childhood, learn more about her brother, and interview her parents — asking them questions we wish we could all go back in time and ask. There is a uniqueness to the sequencing in the film that not only allows Romvari to explore the past but also brings the audience in for a deeper analysis of Sasha’s family. The second half of the film, which introduces this tonal shift, is the lens the film needed to zero in on its character study. As the first half of the film is a diagnosis of the family through the eyes of a young child, there is a wall placed between what we see, hear and experience — like a background to the childhood wonder of a mid-90s summer break. It’s only in the second half that we get to experience what Sasha experiences through memory and hindsight. Romvari walks with us through every experience in the film, reminding us of our own childhood and things we missed when we were too busy living in our own youthful adolescence.
So many of the performances are quiet and toned down into an almost hypnotic state, where Jeremy is lost in his own world, like many teenagers were at that time. With nearly no dialogue, Beddoes is required to emote with only his face. The result is a quiet performance with a devastating blast radius that had me trying to figure out who he was alongside his parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa). Having met many Jeremys in my life, the near silence and space between people like him, placed there by an unapproachable wall, add to the fallibility of memory. Because Jeremy either faded into the background due to his silence or only broke through to create problems, it’s no wonder that these mechanisms make it difficult for Sasha to have an accurate memory of him. The younger siblings in the film alongside Guven are like moving snapshots taken from a fading family photo album on Vancouver Island. Their task is to just be kids — play in the sprinklers, splash around at the beach, and watch TV on a big rear-projection television. It’s just another aspect of realism that Romvari brings to the film that cements it in the real world and reflects its naturalistic imagery back into the subconscious. It recalls an adolescent summer when the only things that were on your mind were getting home before the sun went down. Zimmer’s expansion of Sasha’s character in adulthood is fascinating. Her anxieties as an adult are entirely charged by her childhood and her family’s relationship to her brother. She has an emptiness that is contrasted by a clean and well-organized apartment, which seemingly provides a mask over her trauma. She may seem unbothered, but underneath it all, she’s nervous and looking for an answer that may or may not exist. It’s a beautiful parallel between Jeremy and Sasha — two people who never had time to connect but share an insecurity that binds them — all through a single production choice.
Sound designer Péter Benjámin Lukács’s use of sound raises the tension and immediacy through the grating noise of basketballs banging against the side of the house or the harsh scratching of a cereal box sliding across the breakfast table. When we are with a young Sasha, we are greeted with the sounds of birds chirping, sprinklers, and rain falling — sounds and senses that stick with you when you recall those summer memories growing up in the West Coast rainforest. Closing the film, Romvari’s choice to use a song by outsider artist Daniel Johnston was an intentional move that beautifully bookends a film about outsiders and encapsulates many of its themes.
Inspired by her own family and her short film Still Processing (2020), Blue Heron is an ultra-personal examination of memory that walks a fine line between documentary and narrative film. It would be a dishonest task to poke holes in a film that was as moving as Blue Heron. Coming up with shortcomings for the sake of criticism would undersell it. Where some might balk at its slower pacing for a ninety-minute runtime, I consider it a feature of the film that takes its time, allows itself to linger and builds toward something that pulls you in and forces you to sit with its characters. Ultimately, Blue Heron soars high as one of the best Canadian films to be released in 2026.
Where to Watch
Blue Heron was viewed via AppleTV.
Also worth checking: CBC Gem (often carries Canadian titles not listed elsewhere).
about the author
Merrick Gajdics is founder, publisher and editor of The Canadian Film Reviewer.