Review: 'Blue Heron' is a heartbreaking debut movie from director Sophy Romvari, about neurodivergence and the unreliability of memory

In her emotionally searing family drama, “Blue Heron,” writer-director Sophy Romvari makes her feature debut and lands on an important truism in filmmaking: Biographical specificity, when done as well as she does it here, leads to emotional universalty.

Romvari’s semi-autobiographical story starts with a family pulling up their U-Haul to a new house on Vancouver Island. The parents, played by Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa, are Hungarian immigrants. There are twin boys, Henry (Liam Serg) and Felix (Preston Drabble), who act as you’d expect boys of around 10 years old would. And there’s the observant youngest child, Sasha, age 8, played by Eylul Guven, a quietly moving newcomer.

There’s one more person in the family: The kids’ teen half-brother, Jeremy, played by Edik Beddoes, also making his movie debut. Jeremy is the only blond in the family, and that’s not the only reason he stands out. He seldom speaks, and is withdrawn from his younger siblings. It becomes clear that Jeremy is somewhere on the autism spectrum — and when each viewer realizes that is a good indicator of whether they know someone who’s neurodivergent. 

In the first half of the film, Romvari captures through young Sasha’s inquisitive gaze the many ways a neurodivergent family member can become the center of the house. Jeremy’s obstinance, his refusal to do what his parents tell him, and even his run-ins with the law, occupy the parents’ time and attention — particularly the mother, who questions her parenting skills and at one point gets angry at her husband for detaching from Jeremy’s troubling behavior.

In the second half, the movie shifts abruptly. It’s year’s later, and we’re following a young woman in Vancouver, B.C. (played by Amy Zimmer). She’s a filmmaker, and we watch set up her documentary camera before gathering a group of social workers together to discuss a case file. It doesn’t take long to piece together that the case is Jeremy, and the filmmaker is the adult Sasha.

It’s here, building on the events in the movie’s first half, that Romvari gets to the real point of her delicately devastating film: The unreliability of memory, and how the things we think we remember from our childhoods may not hold up to scrutiny. 

Romvari draws moving performances from her largely unknown cast, creating a fractured family trying to find their way through an intractable situation — one encountered by thousands of families, though each feels like they’re the only ones in the world facing it. “Blue Heron” doesn’t offer easy solutions, but it does declare that those families aren’t alone.

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‘Blue Heron’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 8, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for violent content, and language. Running time: 90 minutes; in English and Hungarian, with subtitles.