Movie of the Week: BLUE HERON (Sophy Romvari, 2025)

Everyone’s talking about the YouTube-to-filmmaker pipeline. What about the Film Twitter-to-filmmaker pipeline?

I first encountered the work of Sophy Romvari back in 2018 after someone tweeted about her short Pumpkin Movie (2017), which I then watched and found remarkably complex — especially considering its narrative constraints (one-room location, a Skype call between friends as the main action) and zero-Canadian-dollar budget. Her art expanded with the short documentary Still Processing (2020), a startling portrait of grief whose reflexive underpinnings would go on to serve as the basis for this feature debut. Bifurcated in structure, Blue Heron divides its time between the late 1990s and the present day as a Hungarian–Canadian family navigates the malaise and mental illness of oldest child Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), who’s the son of Mother (Iringó Réti) from a previous marriage. While our primary window is eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), Romvari wisely avoids sticking solely to the girl’s point-of-view; there’s an omniscient quality that, above all, evokes the feeling of a memory. But it’s not memory in the way that Terence Davies did it. There’s something more slippery at work here, and a lot less nostalgic. As the movie shifts to the present, it nods to obvious influences (Frederick Wiseman, Abbas Kiarostami) without sacrificing its integrity as something that’s fully Romvari’s own. For in Blue Heron I could still clearly hear the voice I was first struck by nearly a decade ago, even if there’s been a steady uptick in scope and ambition ever since. That’s the mark of a filmmaker who really knows what they’re doing, and also of someone who’s lucky enough to have the kind of artist-first institutional support that’s just not possible in the United States. (All power to her if she can resist the pull of our rotten system, which I’m sure is already calling.) The area of the Internet that I’ll still call Film Twitter now has its next certified Real Deal talent, following the rapid rise of Jane Schoenbrun.

Coming soon to the Criterion Channel.