Blue Heron builds a snow globe, then walks back inside it
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Sophy Romvari's semi-autobiographical debut plays like the object the BFI reaches for: a snow globe, unhurried and nostalgic, a self-contained world you observe as if through a glass dome. The world is a Hungarian-Canadian family undone by a disruptive son and by the systems that fail him, and the film is precise about what it withholds — conversations you never hear, behaviours you never understand, a tragedy you never see. What makes the withholding bearable is the intimacy of eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), whose late-1990s summer of balmy boredom is disrupted by her teenage brother Jeremy's increasingly destructive behaviour. His patient but exasperated parents (Ádám Tompa and Iringó Réti) seek help from various professionals and rarely feel heard. Then Romvari lifts the dome off entirely: adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer) is a filmmaker making a documentary to process her hazy memories of Jeremy, searching for the answers her parents searched for years earlier. A moment of magic returns her to them and to her childhood home, and the film becomes a meditation on the inability to alter the past. A snow globe is a world you can see all of and touch none of; the second half is what happens when someone decides to try touching it anyway.
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The containment image is the whole first half: a world you can see entirely and touch not at all. Withholding the conversations, the behaviours, the tragedy is the same bargain — you're given the view but denied the access.
Then the film reverses it. Sending adult Sasha back with a camera and a documentary project is a refusal to stay outside the dome; the magic return is the opposite of observation from a safe distance.