Blue Heron: A Path to Acceptance by Rohannah Raimon

Spoilers Ahead for Blue Heron (2025)

When I first read the synopsis for the film Blue Heron, I thought that perhaps I would find some aspects of the subject matter relatable, but that it would ultimately not hit home for me because it is told from the perspective of a younger sister, not an older sister like me. Mere minutes into the film, I realized that I could not have been more wrong. The semi-autobiographical film is Sophy Romvari’s debut feature, told largely through the eyes of eight-year-old Sasha, played by Eylul Guven, who, in her debut role, assumes the weighty responsibility of standing in for Romvari herself as a kid. 

Mirroring Romvari’s childhood, the film follows a family who emigrated from Hungary to Vancouver Island in the late 1990s, hoping a new place to call home would mean a fresh start. Sasha’s parents (Iringó Reti and Ádám Tompa) are never referred to by name, allowing the viewer to know them solely as Mother and Father, much like a child would. The two middle brothers are almost indistinguishable from one another, but it is of little importance to know who is who, or even their names, as the focus is so rarely on them. Alongside Sasha, the sibling who controls the film's emotional compass is Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), the eldest and only child of the mother’s past relationship. 

Romvari prepares the viewer for what is to come by opening the film with immediate vulnerability —“It's true I spent most of my life being angry at him. The older I get, the more I feel like I never even knew him at all. My image of him now, I know, falls flat compared to reality. Thank you for your memories. They're all I have now." As the film progresses, we come to understand that this voiceover is adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer), thanking her father for the home video footage he recorded when she was a kid, and the person she is referring to is her older brother, Jeremy. 

When the viewer first sees Jeremy on screen, he appears as a slightly reserved, but otherwise typical teenage boy, annoying his brothers at the breakfast table and ignoring his mother’s requests to join his siblings in the car in favor of bouncing a ball against the side of the house. This behavior could be dismissed as that of an angsty teenager, but there is an underlying tension that runs through these scenes, brought on by drawn-out push-in shots and unsettling diegetic sounds, such as the amplified thump of Jeremy’s ball against the house. When Jeremy finally does get in the car, they take a trip to a nature preserve with a connected museum, and it is here that the distance between Jeremy and his family becomes clear. While his mother and siblings take pictures and admire the view, Jeremy remains several steps away, then wanders off by himself. When his family later joins him in the gift shop, Sasha is the only one to notice him take a souvenir keychain — a blue heron — and drop it in his pocket. The film continues in this manner, with Sasha observing, but not understanding, the increasingly risky, disruptive, and dangerous behavior of her older brother. Notably, the keychain appears two more times in the film; once, when Jeremy gives it to Sasha by placing it on top of a sandcastle she is making, and later, hanging from Sasha’s car keys as an adult. 

For kids like Jeremy, it is an incredibly lonely experience, a pain so deep it comes out in unimaginable ways, but I can’t speak on the details of that pain, because I am only a sibling to it, not the source. What I do know, and what Romvari knows, and subsequently expresses through her film, is the feeling of isolation that comes from being the loved one of someone like Jeremy. We see this isolation in the way that Sasha is in the middle of the chaos that is unfolding while simultaneously being on the outside of it — shots of her looking out through the car window as her mother frantically searches for Jeremy, or into the basement window of her brother’s room as her father attempts to calm Jeremy down after he is brought home by the police. In one particularly resonant scene, Sasha and her mother are making dinner together; a long take of the two peeling potatoes captures the tenderness of the moment, only to be interrupted by Jeremy’s footsteps on the roof. Sasha and the home-cooked meal are quickly abandoned as her mother runs outside, desperately trying to persuade Jeremy to come down. The following shots arrive swiftly as a punch to the gut. Potato pancakes burning on the stove, and then Sasha, in a kitchen filled with smoke. 

The camera is rarely left alone with Jeremy; we do not see his perspective because Sasha neither sees it nor understands it. There is one piece of the film that gives us a sliver of insight into Jeremy’s mind: his maps, shown in the opening credits, as well as a shot of Jeremy drawing them in his bedroom later on. This is not something Sasha witnesses firsthand, but rather a collection of physical evidence she can rely on as true, as opposed to memory, which is notoriously unreliable. 

The switch to present-day Sasha comes in the latter portion of the film, and it is what takes Blue Heron from a coming-of-age narrative to something that utterly defies genre and expectation. Romvari takes the concept of meta to a new level by making the bold yet ultimately rewarding choice to have adult Sasha be a filmmaker in the process of creating a piece about her late brother. Through fragmented memories, video footage from her childhood, her brother’s old case files, and conversations with social workers, Sasha attempts to piece together the whirlwind of chaos and pain that consumed her family for years. Even though she was there, both a witness to and a bearer of this pain, she was too young to truly grasp what was happening, and now she needs to know... was there a solution that was missed? Would her brother still be here if something had been done differently? If she had been older, could she have helped? Could anyone have helped? 

Sasha’s desperate search for answers ends in a hard truth. There was nothing more that could have been done. We witness her come to this conclusion in a heartbreaking sequence in which Sasha returns to her old family home and imagines herself as the social worker who visited her parents when she was young. During this envisioned conversation, Sasha hears the reality of what her parents tried to protect her from. She repeats back what the social worker told her parents all those years ago, suggesting that voluntary placement is the best option for Jeremy. In despair about the idea of sending her son away, Sasha’s mother questions, “Have you ever heard of a family like this...I don’t understand why.” Her mother then asks if they will still be able to see him, to which Sasha responds by pulling out a letter she has written and reciting it to them. It begins with, “You will see him again. You will try many, many times to keep him at home. You will do everything in your power to help him. It will consume you entirely.” As someone who has grown up with a sibling in crisis, and who watched their parents try to help in every way imaginable, the entirety of Sasha’s monologue felt like having my heart ripped from my chest. 

Unlike Sasha, I was a young adult when things started to get bad with my sibling, but I can still relate to her because, in many ways, at eight years old, she was just as helpless as I felt at eighteen. It is true that if Sasha had been closer to her brother’s age she might have better understood what was happening and could have communicated with Jeremy in a way that was not possible as a child, but the truth of the matter is that it is an almost impossible thing to understand at any age, and there is only so much help one can provide when someone is struggling to the extent that Jeremy was. As the credits rolled in the theater, I looked around at the tear-stained faces sitting next to me and could tell that I was in a room full of people who had gone through various shades of the same experience. It is the feeling of watching someone you love struggle immensely and not being able to do anything to stop it. 

While it would have been easy to villainize a character like Jeremy or sensationalize his actions, the film does neither. Instead, he is shown through an incredibly empathetic lens — one that does not shy away from the pain he has caused but also understands that he is a complex human, so much more than his worst moments. As an adult, it is clear that Sasha is having a hard time reconciling the Jeremy she remembers with the versions of him others knew, including an old friend who reaches out to say they “always knew him as a special soul who has a kind heart.” This is the last line of dialogue in the film, a poignant choice by Romvari, who shared during a Q&A that the message is based on one she received about her own brother while making the film. Despite this uplifting message, I would not describe the film's ending as happy or even hopeful. Yet in place of hope is acceptance, and with it comes a unique sense of closure.