Comedy/Drama • NR • 89 Minutes • 2025
This review may contain spoilers
Believe it or not, this was my introduction to the very popular Atlantic recipe, Blueberry Grunt — a dessert made with simmering blueberries and steamed dumplings. The sweet comfort food perfectly encapsulates the film Blueberry Grunt, as the name for the sweet treat may have originated from the grunting sound the blueberries make while simmering under the lid, just as the film looks at two people, under pressure, who can no longer communicate unless it’s in the form of blame, insults, or said grunting at one another.
Years after an incident with their son, married couple Vivian and Harold go on their annual blueberry picking camping trip for Vivian’s blueberry grunt recipe. When venturing out in their side-by-side, filled with blueberry buckets and stripped of civilization, their marriage comes under scrutiny when they begin to blame each other for what happened to their son.
While Blueberry Grunt is a bare-bones story of a man and woman learning to love each other and, more importantly, themselves again, the characters remind us of the many past personalities we’ve had and aspects of them we have outgrown but that have shaped us into the people we are today — for better or for worse. The tension in Vivian (Liisa Repo-Martell) and Harold’s (Joel Thomas Hynes) marriage is what happens when, after years of non-communication, everything stewing under the surface slowly starts to eat away at you. Vivian’s quiet and ornery temperament during the first act of the film can feel tedious and flat at times, but with a subtle eye-roll or corner-mouthed smile, she drops her anxieties and frustrations — a brief flicker of who she once was. And then there’s Harold, an aging musician who longs for the days he was back with the band playing in local bars, winking at the gals, and whose happy-go-lucky charm can win anyone over. Yet with seemingly no awareness of when to end the joke, he needs to push his wit to the furthest point of annoyance before he’ll drop the act and you get a glimpse into the caring man he really is. The immediate sympathy I had for Vivian moving forward after spending fifteen minutes with Harold can’t be overstated. As much as his free-lovin’ charm is enough to win you over, his singing, whistling, and non-stop chatter will have you pulling out your hair right next to Vivian.
Sliding into the second and third act, both Vivian and Harold begin to show their true colours, the things that make each other tick, and spew their tit-for-tat insults at each other. Now they have become that old bickering couple with quick-precision insults, undercutting and countering each other like a cage fight. Harold always has a quip in his back pocket, ready to unleash after her endless onslaught of disappointment and contempt toward him. Do the insults and repartee feel fair and justified? Well, no, but this is the vocabulary Vivian and Harold have settled on to communicate in their marriage. At times I found myself uncomfortable with the amount of humiliation in their jabs at one another, like they were taking cues from those old stand-up bits about their own miserable marriages with the ol’ ball and chain. But it’s only when you surrender yourself to how Vivian and Harold’s specific language works in their marriage that you stop watching the film as a therapist and allow yourself to enjoy the subtleties in Repo-Martell and Hynes’s performances.
Writer/director Sherry White fully develops Vivian and Harold in minimal locations, where they strip each other down to their raw emotions and try to break through each other’s armour. Harold can be an irritating dreamer, and Vivian can be a nagging grump, but what White does is keep the crack visible between reality and their self-perception, and make it abundantly clear to you their failings and affability. For an eighty-nine-minute runtime, what White can convey in such little time is astonishing. By the end of the film, I felt like I knew both Vivian and Harold like members of my own family — seeing all sides of them from several different perspectives. White let me predict her characters’ interactions with any person through an intimate omniscience.
In their resolution, the film splinters into two separate readings. Instead of picking a side between the two characters, an optimistic and a pessimistic image emerge for the future of their relationship. We know what makes Vivian and Harold squirm, what makes them smile, and as we are led into the film’s final conflict, they are faced with an external challenge in which they no longer need to communicate their feelings but to solve a threat — a matter of life and death. Either it takes an act of God for these two characters to reconcile their issues, or they can only press pause and go through the motions with a momentary break of civility before the next round in the octagon begins.
What was unexpected was the originality of the music in Blueberry Grunt. Composer Duane Andrews’s tone-setting music was a pleasant surprise that added weight to the scenes and was used as an ellipsis between scenes. Its sombre tones contrast with the film’s humour and shadow its heavier underlying subject matter, causing a balanced equilibrium between comedy and drama. The music lines the film with an icy melody of low guttural grunts and melodic humming that build a sense of scale in an otherwise small-scale location.
For a film that emphasizes the grunt (Vivian and Harold’s communication), the sweetened ending suggests an onward trajectory in their relationship, signifying hope in a situation that can only feel like failure and loss. It’s a transformation of their communication; they no longer need insults and have elevated their marriage to a new chapter.
Where to Watch
Blueberry Grunt was viewed via private screener.
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.