Joel on Film

It would technically be wrong to say that there are two stories being told in Sophy Romvari’s feature debut as writer and director, but it would certainly be more accurate to say that its single story is being viewed from both sides. At the start, Blue Heron is about a family, who arrived some time ago in America from Hungary, dealing with some severe family issues that have gone unexamined for far too long. The issue is an eldest son, whose mental and behavioral health have become a hazard for the entire household.

The first thing to point out about Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) is that, no matter how subtly unnerving his presence is, the film never overplays its hand with this character. There is no broad stereotyping of Jeremy’s various mental illnesses here, even as the movie gives us the perhaps-expected sequences in which Jeremy acts out in some way that necessitates attention. Part of that is in Beddoes’ carefully calibrated performance, which identifies the fragile center of a hardened and expressionless young man.

Another part of it is because of the way Romvari’s storytelling functions, which is that our entire perspective on Jeremy is dictated by the two perspectives we receive here. The first is the prism of his home life, with parents whose approaches are wearing thin and currently require some outside help. He’s his mother’s (Iringó Réti) child from a previous relationship, and since her new marriage to his stepfather (Ádám Tompa), Jeremy has gained three young stepsiblings—a pair of boys, Henry (Liam Serg) and Felix (Preston Drabble), and a girl, Sasha (Eylul Guven).

Jeremy often treats his siblings harshly, though never with anything like intentional violence or physical threat. They are more like annoyances to him, an impression we get early on during an exchange, pointlessly testy and heated, about a cereal box. Jeremy has no reason to keep placing it in front of himself, except that he doesn’t want to watch one of the boys eat his food, and needlessly escalates the situation toward a shouting match.

He walks atop the roof, not only scaling the narrowest point but damaging roof tiles in the process, almost in order to make the set-up even more precarious for himself. Later, he injures his hand by punching through a window that leads from his basement bedroom to the outside. Once before, in his early teens, he even threatened to burn down the house with everyone inside and keeps a small amount of gasoline in his room as a warning.

All of this, though, is communicated with a keenly observant eye by Romvari, who, in any case, has deeper intentions than the simple story that arises from this set-up. Mom and Dad have sought help from a social worker who suggests placement in a foster home. This is where it becomes important to tiptoe around some details.

The second half of the story is still technically Jeremy’s, but it’s told through the lens of a new character, played by Amy Zimmer but, crucially, not identified until much later in the narrative. It is a bit easy to figure out what Romvari is up to and where she’s going with this side of the story, which initially just seems to be an adjusted view of Jeremy’s situation from a more clinical perspective. The character is a filmmaker crafting a documentary about Jeremy’s experiences, and as we find out, she has a pretty incredible amount of access to the family’s home videos.

Something else teases us about this part of the story, though, and since it’s imbued within the final-act gut punch, nothing of the relevant details should be discussed here. In any case, let’s only say that the fairly reserved and observant first half gives way to a second half that seems, on the face of it, to rein itself in even more on the emotional front. There is also no doubt that it involves the gimmick that must remain unspoken (and communicated through a series of simple but slightly confounding edits leading into the epilogue), but Romvari has a purpose for all of that trickery.

The result is a movie of consistent reinvention in the face of a sort of emotional messiness, performed to the hilt by a selection of actors—all of them new faces to this critic, at least—who are completely and credibly naturalistic in their delivery and in their ability to sell fairly difficult material. Blue Heron surprises us in the way that it begins with a single story, challenges our perceptions and expectations by shifting the dynamic and meaningfulness of that story, and still manages to circle back around to a single, unifying theme—of a young man in need of some proverbial adhesive and some grace.

Rating: ***½ (out of ****)