‘Blue Heron’ Infuses Memory With Grace

I DIDN’T EXPECT to cry watching hash browns burn in a cast-iron pan, but that’s the shattering power of director Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron, a semi-autobiographical drama that ruminates on the power and limits of our memories.

Set in the late 1990s, Blue Heron focuses on a young girl, Sasha (Eylul Guven), as her family moves from Hungary to Canada’s Vancouver Island. Hope for a fresh start is disturbed by the erratic and dangerous behavior of the eldest sibling of the family, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), who struggles with an unspecified mental illness.

Jeremy’s parents are unsure how to care for him, their attention torn between helping Jeremy and shielding his siblings. By framing Jeremy’s disruptions through the perspective of a young Sasha, Romvari avoids the trap of easy judgment; we see events the way a child might. Take for instance, a powerful scene midway through the film. Sasha and her mother spend an afternoon peeling potatoes. Then the mother dashes away to check on Jeremy, who is carelessly walking on the roof. We watch the raw, shredded tubers turn black in the skillet. As Sasha hears distant yelling, smoke fills the kitchen, clouding her vision. She may not see all the details of the emotionally charged moment, but she senses how her family is splitting open.

Watching these earlier scenes made me think of something Joy Marie Clarkson said on her religion, culture, and art podcast, Speaking with Joy. Discussing films about memory—specifically Memento—she observed that memory is not an objective “collection of facts ... It is the capacity to tell a story about our past,” she said. “The facts that we have are useless ... if we don’t have the ability to connect them in a meaningful narrative.”

By turning to the surreal, the denouement of Blue Heron encapsulates the way memory reshapes the past through the emotional logic of the present. We witness an adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer) go back in time to talk to her parents. She acts as a prophet, telling them that despite their best efforts to support Jeremy, they’ll still spend most of their life consumed with grief and guilt. Adult Sasha, who holds the wisdom of memory, desperately wants to save her parents from that shame.

In the Bible, God’s people continuously forget God’s promises (Exodus 32), remember them (Deuteronomy 8:1-2), and then misremember them (Exodus 16:3-5). But God remembers perfectly—and charitably.

Blue Heron, similarly, views the past through a lens of grace rather than condemnation. When Sasha inserts herself into an older memory, she offers her parents the forgiveness that they couldn’t yet offer themselves.