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****/**** starring Eylul Guven, Iringó Réti, Ádám Tompa, Amy Zimmer written and directed by Sophy Romvari
by Walter Chaw I don’t know if others will talk about it this way, but Blue Heron, the debut feature of writer-director Sophy Romvari, is the finest, most subtle, most incisive horror film I’ve seen this year. Watching it gave me the same feeling as watching The Exorcist as an old man who has had children and still wakes up in a cold sweat thinking of those times when the kids were sick and I didn’t know why, or in trouble and there was nothing I could do. It’s horror not as jumps and gross-outs (those things don’t really work on me anymore), but as existential helplessness to slow entropy as it claims us and shapes us. The scariest scene in The Exorcist for me now is when a little girl is subjected to a series of medical tests that feel to the worried parent like an inquisitor’s panel of torture devices: useless, sadistic, based on faith in a flawed and fanatical belief system. Love is limited in its ability to heal, see. Having children is reckless. It’s madness. It’s an investment in a mortal commodity that will break you, should it predecease you. It can be a responsibility trap, too, tethering you to this earth when you’d rather cut the straps and float into the sweet, insensible black. My kids are the greatest thing in my life, the only significant contribution I have ever made to a world that doesn’t deserve them. Sometimes it feels like it was a selfish act. Sometimes, when I see them express compassion and kindness to others, it feels like a generous one.
An immigrant Hungarian family moves to Vancouver Island in the 1990s. The parents (Iringó Réti as Mother, Ádám Tompa as Father) are struggling with finances and learning English; the kids, left to their own devices, explore the natural world around them. One day, after dinner, little Sasha (Eylul Guven) asks if she can invite a new friend over. Her mother explains, gently, that it would be better if she went to her friend’s house instead. Sasha’s older brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), Mother whispers, might make her friends uncomfortable. Maybe her friends would tell their parents, and parents, you know, talk. Jeremy spends the days of one idyllic summer bouncing a ball against the outside of the house. It makes an awful noise, like a giant at the door smelling Englishman’s blood, but Sasha’s parents don’t correct Jeremy, just as Sasha hasn’t noticed her brother’s provocative strangeness. He’s different, yes? He’s wrong, he’s off. So many euphemisms for mental illness that is undiagnosed, or novel and profound and aggressive enough as to be essentially untreatable, short of institutionalization. Society tells us that if we can’t care for our children, then we are failures. Moral abominations. It makes sense that evolution would implant that in us, too, favouring a certain alchemy to maximize the survival of our genetic legacy. In other words, the reluctance to act on mental illness is more than a personal blindness. And social safety nets are no less woefully inadequate in addressing behavioural issues.
Jeremy’s parents speak to doctors and specialists. Eventually there are cops, and roundtables with social workers. And between all of that, the kids play. They hide. They undertake grand quests in the tall grass and cut through the backyards of their neighbours. Jeremy tags along sometimes. Silent. Peculiar. He watches cartoons and doesn’t smile. One girl, ditched by her buddies as alliances morph randomly across the space of hours and days, almost drowns in a covered pool, but an adult hears her cries, and she’s fished out on the brink of disaster. “Why did you do that?” her father asks, full of rage at her but mostly at himself over what could have happened while he was distracted by nonsense. Why do we do anything when we’re eight years old on a gauzy summer day? In fifteen years, maybe while you’re on a date, you’ll tell the story of how you almost drowned in a pool once, and that’s why you avoid the water. No one ever asks why you were in the pool; they ask where your parents were and why they weren’t more vigilant. When you have kids, you become an appendage to them. We bestow our fears on our children as their first inheritance: unwanted but unreturnable. At the beach, Jeremy disappears. Mother thinks he’s been swept out to sea. I thought of the sequence in Don Hertzfeldt’s ME when a mother turns her back on a different child, and the child…well, he just floats away. What if Jeremy floated away? Wouldn’t it fix things? Wouldn’t that sudden hole in your heart close up, given time? Yes, it would fix things. No, you would never be the same.
Blue Heron feels like a quilt made of 8mm home movie strips as precious and lovely as they are delicate and crumbling into dust. It’s remembering childhood from an adult perspective. The jokes that went over your head. The concerned glances you couldn’t interpret. The nights you begged (and were welcomed) to sleep in your parents’ bed but woke up in your own and didn’t know how you got there. Oh, I get it now. As an adult, Sasha (Amy Zimmer)–like Romvari herself, who made nonfiction short films before this–has become a documentarian. She pitches a project to her coworkers about a family she wants to study: immigrant parents trying hard in a strange place; kids in steadily declining or increasingly expanding orbit around the family reserve; a deeply troubled son bound to get progressively worse, even dangerous. It doesn’t matter how much you love him. Sasha goes out to visit her subjects, and lo, they are her family from that one summer. Oh, I get it now. We only ever excavate our own pasts. Every book is about you. Every film, every song–all of it can only be known by you through the filter of everything that has made you. Objects are only objective until you interact with them. Does Sasha time-travel back to her childhood? Of course she does. In the same way that Blue Heron is, to me, only about me and my family. It does a good job, somehow (how does Romvari do it?), of placing my pain in the uneasy context of my nostalgia. How did it know? Where did it find all that footage of my parents wondering if I would be alright? Is it magic? It’s magic, right? It sure feels like it.
