When stories appear about someone, particularly a young someone, committing a violent act, we immediately want to know everything. Who are these people? Why did they do what they did? Didn’t those who knew them see what was unfolding, and couldn’t they have done something to prevent it?
Most of the attention that follows any such incident usually focuses on those directly affected, especially anyone who was a target of whatever violence that might have ensued. And while this is a natural reaction, the individuals who typically get lost in the reports are family members of the perpetrators. Not the parents, necessarily, but often the siblings – if they exist.
In the film Blue Heron, which is streaming through Amazon Prime and other services, the half-sister of an emotionally disturbed young man goes on what seems like a life-long quest to understand what caused her brother to act out and, in the process, to resolve her own feelings about how his aberrant behavior affected the rest of her family – but especially her.
She is Sasha, played as an 8-year-old by Eylul Guven and as an adult by Amy Zimmer. In Blue Heron, which was written and directed by the Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker Sophy Romvari, we first meet her during a summer that seems near perfect. This is hardly surprising as Romvari sets most of her film on the lush eastern shore of Vancouver Island.
Sasha is one of four children. She and two brothers are the offspring of the Hungarian immigrants identified only as Mother (played by Iringó Réti) and Father (played by Adám Tompa). Her much older brother Jeremy (played by Edik Beddoes) is Mother’s son from a previous relationship.
Not to put it lightly, Jeremy is a problem. He doesn’t abide by any rules but his own, he can be sweet and then unaccountably cruel, and he steals whatever he wants, both from his parents and from stores. His outright thievery even ends up at one point with his being handcuffed and delivered back home by police officers.
Writer-director Romvari dwells on the efforts by Jeremy’s parents to get help, most of which are in vain. One therapist they consult with talks to them about the boy’s “obstructive” tendencies and urges them simply to be harsher in their reactions. A social-service worker suggests that they might consider placing Jeremy in a foster home, an alternative that Mother rejects outright. The police are little help as well.
It is at this point that Blue Heron departs from the kind of story that has been told before in such films as We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Good Son. Instead of following Jeremy and whatever damage he causes, Romvari begins to play with time and space. We fast-forward to the adult Sasha who assembles a small group of therapists and presents them with a case study to consider.
That Sasha doesn’t tell them that the case is based on her own story reveals her sensitivity about the matter. Romvari emphasizes that feeling by then conflating the two versions of Sasha. The younger version remains on the periphery of the action yet always is observing what is happening. Then the two versions meld, with the older Sasha at one point interviewing the parents in a simulation of what the social-service worker once did – or at least how the young Sasha might have recalled it.
The effect, while at first confusing, gives us a glimpse into Sasha’s world, one that is of a child witnessing things that she can’t begin to understand – but knows inherently that what she’s watching is important. The other is that of a grown woman, still haunted by a past shaped by the anguish felt by parents who were at a loss to save a boy who refused their every effort.
Sasha’s story, then, is representative of those who get left behind when a sibling – or a parent – or anyone who for whatever reason demands attention and who in doing so sucks the energy from the world around them. Blue Heron is indeed Sasha’s story, but it speaks for many of the rest of us as well.
“Movies 101” host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.