For What it's Worth

A devastating drama and a near-future rom-com

“Blue Heron”

⭐⭐⭐1/2 Rating: 3.5 out of 4

In case you missed the best film of the year (so far) — it didn’t play a Cambridge or Somerville theater — you can now catch the devastating picture digitally. In Sophy Romvari’s semi-autobiographical film, a Hungarian family relocates to Vancouver Island, Canada in the 1990s. She fuses family diary, conjured memory and the desire to understand the past within the lens of the present in a haunting, provocative way. It’s also groundbreaking in its narrative structure, bending reality and time to delve deeper into the emotional turmoil and familial pathos that cloud the borders of each frame. 

The first part of the film is told from the point of view of the young daughter — the wide-eyed Sasha, played by Eylul Guven, who is the lone girl among three brothers. The oldest, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) from the mother’s prior marriage, is often mean to her — interfering with her rock castles at the beach, making a shield of cereal boxes at the breakfast table so he doesn’t have to look at his siblings. Those ripples become more troublesome later when he comes home in handcuffs, takes perilous roof walks, and utters veiled threats to burn down the house. Not normal and not safe, which leaves mom and dad (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa) at a loss about what to do. Throughout it all, there’s an edgy “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2011) vibe, despite its home-movie-style naturalism. How the family attempts to resolve the crisis has future consequences, and that’s where we — and the film — jump ahead to the adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer), reflective and steely, making a documentary about a social work case from the 1990s: as you might expect, it’s Jeremy’s. 

The camerawork and camera placements — outside a window, aloofly watching the action from afar, or inside an adjacent room, overhearing conflict and life-altering information through a wall — are subtle and extraordinary. The cast gives robust, yet nuanced, performances. Réti and Tompa are restrained but stressed as the unnamed parents. Zimmer’s fill-in for Romvari burns soulfully in her quest for answers and closure, and Beddoes is at once viperish and intimidating, yet sympathetically vulnerable. The whole composition is a remarkable accomplishment, especially given such humble resources. The cathartic reflection and reframing of events from varying points in time is poetically akin to Cantabrigian Ross McElwee’s latest, “Remake,” likewise propelled by loss and tragedy — which, like “Blue Heron,” has yet to get a feature run this side of the Charles.