Blue Heron

It’s a film that seldom comes out and tells you exactly what’s happening, but its drama is so lucid that before any real tragedy unfolds (or is even hinted at), you feel it in your bones.

A film whose quietly flooring opening frames of a vast landscape becoming home to a compassionate story of a Hungarian-Canadian family navigating an uncertain world together already signal it as a major work, writer/director Sophy Romvari’s intimate and incisive Blue Heron only grows even greater from there.

For a director whose projects have always tested the medium’s capacity to conjure and make peace with the specters of one’s past, it feels like the kind of moment Romvari’s been working towards from the start.

Heartbreaking barely begins to describe it, although the terms masterful and transcendent also apply.

If you’ve ever imagined how you’d try comforting your younger self or your family about the uncertain future ahead of them, Blue Heron may be the most emotionally devastating film of the year — and also perhaps the most comforting.

At its best, Blue Heron soars, creating the world of Sasha’s family in impressively precise ways and allowing the underlying questions to linger without succumbing to simplistic answers or pat moments for cathartic release.

A lyrical study of the twisting nature of memory and the lasting impact of childhood trauma, Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s debut Blue Heron has an authenticity and sensitivity that steers it through occasional moments of narrative affectation.