BLUE HERON
Starring: Eylul Guven, Iringó Réti, Ádám Tompa, Edik Beddoes, and Amy Zimmer
Director: Sophy Romvari
QUENTIN
I can’t say Blue Heron is a bad movie; I can say, for better or worse, it is extremely reminiscent of Aftersun, a movie whose critical acclaim I never understood. It’s not that I don’t get writer-director Sophy Romvari’s intent as she explores her fractured memory and hinted-at trauma, but the slow pacing and jarring shift to a pseudo-documentary make it all too clinical. I was never invested in Sasha’s experience as an oblivious child (Eylul Guven) or as an answer-seeking adult (Amy Zimmer). I genuinely hope Blue Heron helped Romvari process whatever she needed to process, but this therapy session doesn’t need an audience.
ADRIANO
Blue Heron is one of those movies where you can’t believe it’s a feature debut. Director Sophy Romvari's deceptive mundanity and directorial swings are bold and, despite its leisurely pace, never boring. Admittedly, its halfway structural shift threw me off guard and worried me initially. But by the end, as I was wiping away tears, I saw the purpose. Memory is a fragile thing, and it’s easy to cling to as fact when the true facts are out of reach. That’s a tricky thing to pull off on film, but Blue Heron does it confidently and excellently.
BODE
There’s a moment in Blue Heron that involves a child and her father’s camcorder. She captures a moment that I won’t spoil, but it becomes key to understanding what writer-director Sophy Romvari is getting at with her deceptively simple feature debut. Expanding upon the ideas in her previous shorts, the film is, among many things, a multimedia interrogation of the limitations of memory and the difficulty of reconstructing them, even with all the evidence. It packs a real wallop in that exploration, thanks to its quietly daring formalism and naturalistic performances, making it a pretty remarkable effort that leaves me excited to see where Romvari goes next.
This film was reviewed by Quentin as part of Bitesize Breakdown's coverage of the 2025 International FilmFestival Mannheim-Heidelberg.