Despite being one of the most natural processes we will experience, growing up is not always easy. Even those who are fortunate enough to spend their childhoods in comfort and luxury will know that the road towards adolescence and then later adulthood is anything but smooth – it’s extremely challenging, since not only do we have to deal with physical changes, but our entire perspective on the world shifts. Everything begins to look much smaller than it did in our youth, and each day brings new experiences, as well as the wisdom to see beneath the surface and realise that life is not as simple as it appeared to be in our more carefree, hopeful days. This is something that director Sophy Romvari knows all too well, as it forms the basis for Blue Heron, her fascinating directorial debut in which she crafts a semi-autobiographical story that follows Sasha, an impressionable young girl who is the daughter of first-generation Hungarian immigrants that settle on Vancouver Island, where they intend to spend the foreseeable future. The days, weeks and months that follow are all different, with the young protagonist attempting to juggle her own budding worldview with the challenges faced by being around a volatile family – parents who are more focused on the practical aspects of handling a major move, an emotionally fragile older brother whose mental health has unfortunately become a burden, and a community that is doing what it can to accommodate these mysterious but well-meaning strangers. It’s a story that lingers with the viewer, even if it can quite pedestrian at times, which is a realisation we tend to make almost immediately, the moment when it becomes clear that, in spite of her best efforts, Blue Heron is too safe in following the usual narrative structure, adding very little that we haven’t already seen in similarly-themed films, and ultimately being quite limited in terms of both perspective and its eventual analysis of key themes.

There are essentially two narrative threads that form the foundation of Blue Heron, namely those of the coming-of-age story and the immigrant drama, both of which are vital to the ideas being explored. Most of us can relate to the former, another large portion to the latter – but its to the very small niche group that can find resonance in both that we find Blue Heron making some of the most poignant and intriguing observations. At its core, this is a story about a young girl who simply does not know how to make her way through the world – she’s too young to stand on her own or make sense of most of what surrounds her, but a sudden burst of maturity (undoubtedly formed from the immediate change of scenery that would force even the most oblivious of people to pay attention to their environment), she begins to pick up on the fact that, despite the promise of a fresh and exciting start, she and her family are in the midst of some enormous challenges. Romvari is building much of this story from her own childhood, or at least as much as she remembers it. The approach is primarily to create a dreamlike visual poem, consisting of dozens of episodic moments in the life of this family as they begin to adapt to their new home, while also dealing with the various domestic trials and tribulations that they believe to be unique to their family, but in reality are much more common than they initially imagined. It’s a fascinating approach, but one that does strike us as being somewhat too obvious, especially since it doesn’t seem to be able to grasp absolutely every point that it feels it is trying to make, which ultimately does become something of a burden as the story doesn’t hit all of its targets, choosing to instead focus on the same small handful of ideas that usually define both the coming-of-age and immigrant drama tropes.

Regardless of how much the director shows herself to be willing to bare her soul, Blue Heron is still quite a flawed work, for the exact reasons that we often find when looking at these lacklustre coming-of-age dramas, especially those that are directorial debuts. Over time, it has seemingly become a logical path for young filmmakers to venture into feature-length storytelling with semi-autobiographical accounts of their lives, particularly their childhood. By labelling it as being rooted in their firsthand experience, they can immediately pique our curiosity, while working within a genre that tends to be extremely simple and direct in practice, not requiring too much work outside of having a generally well-defined structure. This is ultimately the core of why Blue Heron doesn’t leave an impression – there is nothing inherently poor about this film, which is handsomely made and filled with an honesty that we can at least appreciate from a distance. However, when it comes time to follow through on these ideas, it begins to fall apart, since it seemingly realises that it doesn’t have a perspective original enough to actually explore much deeper themes. A film like Blue Heron is always going to need to justify its existence by proving that it has something to say – unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be achievable here, because ultimately we don’t ever find this film to be saying anything particularly interesting, especially since the entire premise essentially being rooted in the fact that growing up can be a challenging experience just hammers in how the entire film just feels limited in every way, never being daring enough to challenge itself or the audience to do anything we have not seen many times before.

The execution of Blue Heron is one of the key areas in which it falls apart and becomes just another mildly decent coming-of-age drama, and a lot of this has to do with the smaller elements. The cast is uniformly very good – an ensemble of lesser-known actors and complete newcomers who bring an organic honesty to the film, which is a very good start and one of the primary reasons the film does manage to be effective in many parts, even if only momentarily. Eylul Guven (in her debut performance) is a strong lead – she isn’t tasked with doing much dramatic work, but simply her willingness to lean into the more challenging emotions is at least interesting to witness, even if there are far too many moments where it feels like she is just being asked to play a stoic, unemotional young protagonist to reflect the more downbeat nature of the narrative. Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa are strong as her parents, who are simply trying their best to give their children a future, and Edik Beddoes is perhaps delivering the best performance in the film, with his ability to walk that narrow tightrope between angsty teenager and deeply disturbed young man (whose eventual fate is perhaps the only truly emotional moment of the film that feels earned) is very strong and feels like the closest this film gets to truly capturing the spirit of the material and everything that the director is attempting to communicate. Sadly, nothing actually ever feels all that cohesive, since Romari is spending too much time actually trying to signal how we should feel, she neglects to actually do anything that feels entirely earned. It’s lacklustre at the best of times, and doesn’t ever truly amount to anything all that impressive, despite all of its potential.

Blue Heron is a film that does what it set out to do, but never amounts to much more than this. It can’t be simply attributed to the fact that it’s a debut feature, since there have been plenty of other filmmakers who made their debuts with similarly-themed films that were both far better or more disastrous, meaning that it’s not necessarily the material, but rather what is done to tell the story. Unfortunately, despite a strong visual eye and ability to craft something that looks quite beautiful, Romvari falters when it comes time to actually explore this story and what it represents. It’s a deeply personal narrative, but she neglects to actually underline what makes it so meaningful to her – logically, she doesn’t need to walk us through every decision with clear justification (although there are far too many moments where her intentions become so clear, its almost distracting), but it can feel like she is putting too much distance between the viewer and this film, despite the constant attempts to rally us around what she wants to portray as a nearly universal experience. As a whole, Blue Heron is merely competent – its decent enough for us to be confident in Romvari’s abilities to cobble together something quite strong (whatever she chooses as her next film certainly seems like it has the potential to be a major improvement), but lacks anything that makes us feel entirely enthusiastic, or ready to proclaim her the next exciting wunderkind, which is not to discredit her skills, but rather acknowledge the teething problems present in this film, on which her sophomore directorial outing (whenever she chooses to make it) can only be an enormous improvement, and one that hopefully will show her talents with more sincerity and attention to both narrative detail and the communication of certain emotional ideas.