The point of cinematic realism is the inner life, and the miracle of movies is their power to portray subjectivity, though few filmmakers manage to attain that power—even despite their best efforts. Sophy Romvari’s first feature, “Blue Heron,” which opens Friday, is among the most inward—and among the most cannily, movingly strategic—of recent movies. Its boldly distinctive method is inseparable from its emotional vitality, and its audacious sense of form is as immediate and personal as the story it tells. It’s a memory-film that captures inner life with physical style: patience, speed, precision, and breathtaking leaps. The story involves the troubles of a beloved brother, and the longtime effort to reckon with his pain and that of his family. Romvari offered a nonfiction version of the story, about her own family, in her short film “Still Processing” (streaming on the Criterion Channel), which is admirable in its candor but offers raw material along with its raw emotion. “Blue Heron” develops the subject with an approach that reveals psychological depths from great aesthetic heights.

The feature is set in British Columbia, largely in the span of a summer during the nineteen-nineties, in a calm residential suburb on the ruggedly alluring Vancouver Island. The movie’s point of view is established with a brief opening voice-over by a woman named Sasha, whose reminiscences of childhood, and of her brother Jeremy, make up the bulk of the film. The story begins with the family moving to a house in that Vancouver Island neighborhood when Sasha (played as a child by Eylul Guven) is eight. Her parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa) are émigrés from Hungary; so is Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), the oldest of her three brothers, who has a different biological father than his siblings. (The other two boys, played by Liam Serg and Preston Drabble, seem slightly older than Sasha.) The parents, who are never named, have rough-edged, quasi-bohemian ways. Dad seems to be some sort of artist; he spends much of his time at a computer in the living room, doing what he calls his work, and he expects his wife to take the children out of the house so that he has peace and quiet to do it.

So Mom clears them out, taking them to a nearby nature preserve and natural-history museum, where the sharp-eyed Sasha notices the teen-age Jeremy stealing a souvenir keychain from a rotating rack. Troubles mount: another day, when Sasha returns home from playing with new friends, Jeremy is lying on the front stoop, prompting a panic-stricken neighbor to call about what appears to be a corpse. Jeremy is, of course, alive and unwell, exhibiting escalating behaviors that a psychologist eventually labels “oppositional-defiant disorder.” While Dad is developing photos in his darkroom, Jeremy flicks on the lights. Another day, as Mom loads the children into the car, Jeremy tosses a basketball against the house, again and again, his passive aggression registering through the ball’s unyielding thuds and his own frozen gaze. Some of his acts are dangerous or terrifying. He walks on the house’s sloped roof. He gets arrested for shoplifting. He makes fearsome threats. Sasha catches glimpses of her parents’ private struggles to navigate Jeremy’s needs, watching her mother collapse tearfully in her father’s arms, putting her ear to the door of the room where her parents meet with a social-services agent, peering through the window of Jeremy’s basement bedroom to see him nearly come to blows with their Dad.

The movie’s fluid observational construction conjures drama by compounding micro-incidents; its narrative emerges from the shaping of young Sasha’s inchoate sensibility as she observes the troubles that surround her. The story is something of a palimpsest, with Romvari’s own perspective intertwining with the character’s and conveying a sense of being both inside and outside the action. Romvari’s images are distinguished by their dual sense of logical efficacy and aesthetic loft. She overcomes the filmed image’s default setting as information, its inherent resistance to revelation, and builds the movie with an unmistakable evocation of Sasha’s point of view, but she does so undogmatically, without limiting herself to the child’s visual perspective. This choice makes those images that do stand in for Sasha’s line of sight all the more startling and forceful. The cinematography (by Maya Bankovic) leaves powerful afterthoughts of dramatic ideas while delivering feelings in real time. Many shots appear to be filmed with telephoto lenses, suggesting, via the camera’s distance from the action, Sasha’s distance from her own past and her struggle to remember. Other times, the camera pans slowly, its drifting movements evoking the associative efforts to make sense of long-ago events. Objects interposed between subjects and the camera hint at the quest for clarity through the intervening years.

Romvari herself grew up on an island in British Columbia, and the natural landscape plays a significant role in her movie’s textures and tones. There are majestic overhead views, grand Pacific sunsets, houses tucked among surrounding forests, their lights showing like fireflies through the foliage. The region plays like a force unto itself, conditioning the mood of the family’s dreamy yet precarious walks on jagged promontories and beach visits from cliff-bound paths. From the opening scene of the family’s move to town, the soft and wistful light shapes the film’s emotional world. The production design (by Victoria Furuya) reinforces the reminiscent tone with details evoking Sasha’s nineties childhood—cordless phone, floppy disks, camcorders. This specific technological moment is played crucially but lightly, gracefully, with a child’s-eye fanaticism for incidentals that anchor moments in memory. The film also highlights, through such enduring artifacts as cassette recordings and photographic prints, the archival basis of memory itself.

Romvari delights in the gleam and glow of children’s play, and she can’t resist showing it tarnished. Sasha makes new friends in the neighborhood, but her parents won’t let her invite them over, for fear that she’ll end up embarrassed at Jeremy’s behavior. The younger two brothers float paper boats in the kitchen sink and Jeremy plays along, sprinkling flour on their heads—but making the kitchen a total mess. In one scene, the kids are bouncing in the back yard on a trampoline when Jeremy returns home with a policeman, under arrest. (The incident endures in iconic fashion—at that moment, Sasha’s father, who was videotaping the jumping kids, hands her the still-running camera.) The actors seem tuned to one another like musicians in an orchestra, and Romvari guides them through performances that feel neither overplayed or understated. Their exchanges take place in a conversational middle range that puts their emotional substance—bewilderment, frustration, anger, quiet despair—into sharp and poignant contrast.

Sasha, the film’s most prominent character, is essentially a Jamesian central consciousness. The real protagonist of the story is Jeremy, whose character is crafted with a daring inventiveness that unites intellectual perspective and love. Though he dominates Sasha’s childhood—and though, in retrospect, his voice seems prominent throughout— he actually speaks very little in the film, and his voice is scantly heard. His few lines of dialogue have a power that far exceeds their word count, but what speaks for Jeremy most of the time are his physical gestures, which blend blank detachment with willful ferocity. His other mode of expression is making maps, detailed ones, which are also works of imagination—one town he’s mapped is called “Fantasyville.” Though these works don’t have a public reach, they nonetheless have a lasting impact on Sasha, and, it turns out, on others.

Some plot twists are just a matter of marketing (see: “The Drama”). The one in “Blue Heron” gave me a thrilling jolt even on a repeat viewing. Suffice it to say that eventually the tale of childhood catches up with the adult Sasha (played by Amy Zimmer), a filmmaker, who attempts to make sense of her past and Jeremy’s fate by undertaking her own investigation, at several decades’ remove. Romvari films Sasha’s efforts by combining authentic documentary elements—the adult Sasha’s interviews with real-life psychologists and social workers—and scenes featuring dramatic monologues of a rare poetic sublimity. With its fusion of memory and history, its blend of nonfiction and torrential imagination, its exploration of the very nature of memory, “Blue Heron” takes a place alongside other recent films, such as “Nickel Boys,” “The Mastermind,” and “The Secret Agent,” that offer similarly original approaches to to the collective and personal past—and to the very terms of its survival, its transmission, its unshakable power. ♦