‘Blue Heron’ is reminiscent of ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’, though viewed through the lens of memory rather than immediate experience. Set largely within a Hungarian immigrant family living in Vancouver during the 1990s, this is a drama centred around a teenage boy with oppositional defiant disorder, where families themselves had neither the language nor the understanding to make sense of what they were witnessing.

What is particularly clever is the film’s structure. Thirty years later, Sasha, the younger sister, now a filmmaker played as an adult by Amy Zimmer, returns to interview members of her own family as though making a documentary about her childhood. In effect, she places herself back inside those memories, asking the questions she was too young to formulate at the time. Potentially this could have been a confusing narrative device, but in practice it is a very astute one, illustrating how trauma rarely disappears until we are prepared to revisit and interrogate it.

At the heart of the story is Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), Sasha’s older brother, whose increasingly erratic behaviour tears the family apart. The police are repeatedly called, his parents are overwhelmed, and eventually social services intervene, taking him into care because he has become a danger both to himself and to those around him. Yet the film never attempts to offer a neat psychological explanation for why Jeremy behaves as he does. Instead, it remains firmly focused on the impact his behaviour has on everyone else.

Sasha’s return to the past becomes an attempt to piece together a family history that has always felt incomplete. She is assembling fragments of memory like a jigsaw puzzle, while recognizing that memory itself is unreliable. That gives the film a poignancy that extends well beyond its central mystery. Indeed, this is a film less interested in certainty than in the act of remembering.

The drama is also remarkably restrained. Rather than heightening the emotional moments, the film often underplays them, allowing silences and small gestures to carry the weight. In that respect it most reminded me of ‘The Virgin Suicides’, while ‘Aftersun’ also comes to mind in the way an adult revisits the past through images and recollections, trying to understand family relationships that seemed impenetrable during childhood.

What makes ‘Blue Heron’ so compelling is that it is not really interested in explaining Jeremy. Instead, it examines the ripple effects of his behaviour across an entire family. It asks whether we can ever truly make peace with experiences for which there are no satisfying answers. By the end, the film becomes almost documentary-like, imagining conversations across time and offering tentative suggestions about what may have become of Jeremy without ever claiming certainty.

Viewers looking for a dramatic resolution or clear psychological explanations may find the ending frustrating. Yet that feels entirely appropriate. ‘Blue Heron’ is ultimately a thoughtful, introspective and elliptical meditation on memory, family and trauma, suggesting that the questions we continue asking ourselves may be just as important as the answers we never receive.