What can film do?

Blue Heron
2025, dir. Sophy Romvari, 91 min.

What can film do that other media cannot? The quality of any movie is determined by the quality of its answer to that question. Blue Heron, Canadian director Sophy Romvari’s debut, spends its first half in an extended remembrance: a narrator’s voice cues us to it as she thanks someone—who, we don’t know—for sharing memories of her brother with her. That voice, we can assume, belongs to the adult version of the eight-year-old girl we shortly see on the screen, the youngest child in a family of six that has recently emigrated from Hungary to British Columbia. Sasha is the affective frame of the film, but at its emotional center is her half-brother Jeremy.

Jeremy, already a teenager when his three younger siblings are still firmly children, acts out in ways that confound and alarm his parents (named Mother and Father in the credits), already overwhelmed with the adjustment process to the new country. (In one particularly gutting moment, the mother asks the father why he’s speaking to her in English. “That was our agreement,” he answers.) Sasha’s memories of this time appear on screen as layered and gauzy as dreams; instances of clarity attach to moments captured in photographs—Father often trains a camera or camcorder on the children and has installed a darkroom in their home—or otherwise emerge from intensity and pain: Jeremy running away from a family beach trip only to be found at a nearby gas station; Sasha being tricked, and then laughed at, by a trio of girls she thought were her new friends; Mother’s hands kneading grated potato into raw egg as she tells Sasha that it would be best if her friend Emma didn’t come over to the house; she doesn’t want Sasha to be embarrassed.

And then, in a decisive moment, the moment that seems to have split Sasha’s life irreversibly into a before and after, the narrative logic of the film splits, too. On the phone to someone undisclosed, speaking in English, Mother reveals that a social worker has offered to take Jeremy to a home that might suit him better, and that she has agreed to it. “I said yes.” The camera pans into an apartment interior; a character we’ve never seen before sits on a sofa, her back to the camera, holding an iPhone. We’ve jumped forward in time—or have we? This curly-haired woman is, seemingly, on the other end of Mother’s conversation. We can still hear the creaking of the trampoline springs, Sasha and her two brothers jumping in the background.

This is the kind of slippage made possible by the overlapping of images and sound; by the embodiment of characters by people, called actors; by the absence of words and their tendency to force order and sequence. For the remainder of the film, Romvari continues to make use of the medium in this way, casting characters across time and space, using their physical presence to disturb and destabilize a story that might otherwise be tempting to tell in a linear fashion.

Blue Heron is not a large film, but its answer to the question of what film can do is significant. On one level, film is a tool for closure-seeking, commingling past and present in ways otherwise impossible. But on a deeper level—and here is where Blue Heron, hopefully, hints at further great works from Romvari—film can resist the often irresistible tendency toward the neat narrative, hew closer to nonsense than to logic, reproduce not facts but the truth.