TIFF 2025: Blue Heron — 3 Brothers Film

Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron walks a difficult tightrope between autofiction and documentary, art and therapy, past and present. Core aspects of the film shouldn’t work and yet they do—spendidly—and in ways that take your breath away. It’s the sort of personal, reflective, bold filmmaking that once-upon-a-time was a Canadian hallmark, and perhaps can be again.

Blue Heron is the feature debut of the Canadian Romvari, who has received acclaim for her short films, including Still Processing (2020). Blue Heron treads similar ground as these shorts. Like Still Processing, Blue Heron, which recently won the Best Canadian Discovery Award at TIFF, interrogates her past, particularly the questions that surround her eldest brother’s mental illness and eventual death. Romvari was young at the time and so is her stand-in, Sasha (Eylul Guven), in Blue Heron. Everything Sasha witnesses about her brother’s suffering is viewed through the lens of childhood; she notices his odd behaviour but not the severity of it since she lacks the contextual understanding of an adult. For instance, she might notice her parents having a passionate conversation about him in the room next door, but she’s more interested in what’s playing on TV in front of her, in this scene, the iconic Canadian PSA: “The House Hippo.”

Over the first half, Blue Heron is an autobiographical portrait: we meet a Hungarian-Canadian family of six that has just moved to Vancouver Island in the mid-1990s. The mom (Iringó Réti) and dad (Ádám Tompa) are finding their footing in the new environment and struggling with resources. The middle two brothers (Liam Serg and Preston Drabble) quickly adjust to the newfound freedom and opportunity for play. As the youngest, Sasha focuses on meeting new friends in the neighbourhood. And the eldest, the troubled Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), just wanders, in the house, their yard, his mind. We quickly learn that Jeremy has been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, but that seems like it’s only scratching the surface of what is going on with this young man. In his mid-teens, Jeremy already seems adrift from the rest of his family sheerly through his age and the normal dictates of teenage angst. But he also seems lost in himself. He’ll lay on the front porch for hours, essentially motionless, prompting the neighbours across the street to call his parents and warn them their son is dead out front. Other times, he is suddenly violent, smashing windows or stomping around on the roof completely out of the blue. Mostly, he’s distant, refusing to respond to his parents, justify his actions, or even make eye contact with those around him.

Beddoes is remarkably adept here as Jeremy, even more impressively so considering it’s his debut. Sporting large, wire framed glasses and long straight hair that covers much of his face, his small eyes seemingly disappear in the frame, small windows into the inscrutable world of his mind. He has limited dialogue but that doesn’t stop him from registering so strongly, as both a troubled boy and someone with a fascinating, mysterious internal life.

If Blue Heron were simply a story of a family adjusting to life on Vancouver Island and struggling with the mental issues of the eldest son, it’d be a fine picture, but somewhat insubstantial. But no, it’s so much more, because midway through the film takes a meta turn as we meet a now adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer), a filmmaker (like Romvari), who is exploring her past through her documentary work. The first time we meet Sasha as an adult, she’s interviewing a group of social workers about Jeremy’s case, asking them to discuss and react to the circumstances of this family as if they were a potential case they could take in the present. Featuring real social workers in a free-flowing, unscripted sequence, this scene introduces the film’s narrative radicalism, blending memory with fiction, documentary with narrative storytelling, improvised conversations with scripted scenes. But it doesn’t stop there as Sasha not only continues to examine her family’s past and the lack of closure around her brother’s death, but literally inserts herself into the past, entering the earlier scenes in place of a social worker we meet in the first half, recreating early moments so she can have hypothetical conversations with her family members and provide some closure to her past self.

This gambit is staggering, but clarifies so much of Romvari’s project, which is not only about reflecting on the past through cinema, but using cinema to relive it. Like few filmmakers working today, she understands that cinema is a memory machine, allowing us to travel through time in order to revisit and recontextualize the past. Of course, that doesn’t change the present, which is the eternal tension with any kind of reflection: you might get a better understanding of the past, but that does nothing to change it, and in fact, the very interrogation of the past through art changes your perception of the past. It’s as if Romvari’s film is silently acknowledging the neurological aspect that every time we revisit a memory in our minds, we change it, rewriting the pathways, and, thus, can never access the original moment again. The more we remember, the more we forget, and yet, we’re endlessly drawn into the corners of our mind trying to make sense of a reality that can be so painful and mysterious. Perhaps, like Jeremy, we too become prisoners of our own mind.

There are flashes of Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun in Romvari’s mixture of autobiographical bittersweet childhood memories and melancholy reflection. But there’s also a distinctly Canadian thread in Romvari’s approach. The austere formal approach, with minimal cuts or takes, goes back to 1960s direct cinema, which birthed Canadian film in many ways. The subjectivity of the camera recalls the best of Atom Egoyan in the 1980s and 1990s, where the camera always displays an intensity that views every moment with mournful yearning. Tonally, it’s worlds away from Guy Maddin, but there’s even a touch of Maddin in the film’s formal adventurousness and Romvari’s willingness to play with reality and break the rules of how you present a true story.

Canada has built much of its cinematic legacy on a savvy blend of documentary and fiction, which makes sense, because Canada is a nation that inhabits the border lands between Britain and America, English and French, settler and Indigenous. So it’s only fitting that Romvari has now provided her own major new addition to this Canadian cinematic legacy, a film that embodies the tension that lies at the heart of autobiographical work. Canadian cinema’s commercial fortunes might be withering on the vine, but if Blue Heron is any proof, its artistic possibility is in full bloom.

9 out of 10

Blue Heron (2025, Canada)

Written and directed by Sophy Romvari; starring Eylul Guven, Iringó Réti, Ádám Tompa, Edik Beddoes, Amy Zimmer, Liam Serg, Preston Drabble.