Critic Reviews

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.

Sophy Romvari‘s graceful, singularly heartsore debut feature has a sharp understanding of how memories form and age: Often it’s the incidental, ambient details you recall as vividly as the more significant events at hand.

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.

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.

An exquisite debut feature.

This devastating drama is an act of remembrance for its filmmaker, who has been open about how much of this story is her own. It’s also a reminder of the power of filmmaking to turn the deeply personal into relatable art, and an announcement of a major talent, one who has made the best film of the year to date.

The film is not just a means of trying to understand if there was some better possible outcome but also a fantasy of opening up the past and slipping back inside it to see what you missed when you were there.

Though I am sure there will be many more family memory films, Blue Heron sets the bar at a new level.

Blue Heron is the kind of movie that begs to be written about at length. For now, I'll have to be content with assuring you that this is one of the year's best movies. If it comes to a theater near you, don't miss it.

Sophy Romvari’s luminous debut feature “Blue Heron” is a loving and studious act of remembrance.