Sophy Romvari’s first film rebuilds her 1990s childhood room by room and watches a family fail to help an older son. It is careful, quiet and often painful to sit through. The present-day strand is thinner than the past it is trying to reach.
Sasha (Eylul Guven) is the youngest child in a family in 1990s Canada, and for most of the first hour the film is only what she can see and hear from where she happens to be standing. Her older brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) is in trouble in a way nobody names for a long time. Her mother (Iringó Réti) and father (Ádám Tompa) are trying to keep a house running around him. Sophy Romvari, who wrote and directed, has drawn on her own childhood for this, and she has made a first film that keeps its voice down. Nothing is explained to Sasha, so very little is explained to us.
It is very good and we recommend it, with one reservation we will come to. The reservation is about structure, not about the family, because the family is as well observed as any we have seen on screen in a long while. Romvari does not build to a scene where someone says what is wrong with Jeremy. She shows a boy who cannot settle, parents who take it in turns to be patient and to run out of patience, and a small girl who has learned to read the temperature of a room before she walks into it.
Maya Bankovic shoots from a child’s height and keeps the camera where a child would be allowed: on the stairs, in a doorway, on the far side of a room while the adults talk. Victoria Furuya fills the house with the clutter of the decade and never once asks us to admire it. Kurt Walker cuts slowly and keeps returning to the same corridor, the same table, the same view of the water, so that after half an hour we know the house as well as Sasha does. The sound does a great deal of the work. Arguments arrive through walls, a television plays in another room, and the loudest thing in the film is usually a door.
It got to us. There is a stretch in the middle where Jeremy is simply not in the frame for a long time, and nobody tells Sasha where he is, and Guven keeps glancing at the door as if she can will him back through it. We were more upset than the film ever asked us to be, and that is the method. Romvari does not raise the volume. She lets us fill in what the child cannot, and we did, and it hurt.
Guven is remarkable in the way the best child performers are, which is to say she does not seem to know she is in a film. Beddoes plays Jeremy from the outside: we never get into his head, and the film is honest enough to admit that neither did anyone around him. Réti gives the mother a tiredness that has gone past complaint, and Tompa’s father is a man who keeps trying to be reasonable in a house where reason has stopped working. Nobody here is a villain, which makes it worse.
Our reservation is with where the film goes after the first hour, and we will say as little about it as we can. Romvari changes the shape of the picture, and the idea behind the change is a good one. But the early passages have such a hold that what follows feels slight beside them, and there is a stretch where we were watching a film about remembering rather than a family. Some critics have found the later section the best thing in the picture, and we can see why, even if we found the road there a little thin.
As a first film it is unusually sure of what it is doing, and it does not borrow its manner from anyone. The closest comparison is not to other debuts but to the sort of patient, observational filmmaking that trusts a fixed frame and a long take to carry meaning. At 91 minutes it never outstays itself.
Watch it in one sitting, with no phone. It is a film about not being told things, and it works best if you let it keep its secrets for as long as it wants to.
