Iringó Réti has one screen part that matters so far, the mother in Blue Heron, and she plays it by refusing to do what most actors would do with it. She never once breaks down, and the film is more painful for it.
Fi1m perspective
For most of Blue Heron (2026), Iringó Réti is keeping a house running. She is the mother of a family in 1990s Canada whose older son is in trouble nobody will name, and Sophy Romvari's film keeps her at the edge of things, seen from wherever her youngest daughter happens to be standing. What Réti does with that position is the reason the film works. She never raises her voice and she never collapses. She gives the mother a tiredness that has gone past complaint, the look of someone who stopped expecting help a while ago and has not mentioned it.
We found her harder to watch than the boy at the centre of the trouble. Edik Beddoes plays Jeremy from the outside, as the film intends, so we never quite reach him; Réti we reach at once, and what we reach is a woman with nothing left in reserve who is still getting the dinner on. Réti has said the mother was not allowed to cry on camera, that "she is someone who feels intensely yet cannot afford to break down", and we can see the cost of that rule in every scene she is in. It is the opposite of the big maternal turn, and it is a large part of why nobody in the film comes off as a villain.
The part came late, and it came from the stage. Réti trained at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest, graduating in 1999, and spent the years after in Hungarian theatre, at the Csokonai Színház in Debrecen among others, and in Berlin at the Maxim Gorki Theater. She also writes and directs for the theatre. Screen work began in 2010, in shorts and Hungarian television and film, and there is a run of features we have not seen, Most of the Souls That Live Here (2016) and Melegvizek országa (2022) among them. She works in Hungarian, German, English, Romanian and Italian, and Romvari, making a film out of her own childhood, cast her for what she could do rather than for any resemblance to the woman she was playing.
It is one film, and we should say so. A reputation cannot be built on a single performance, however good, and the rest of the record is mostly unseen outside Hungary. But the thing she does in Blue Heron, denying the audience the release it wants, is not a beginner's trick; it comes from twenty years on stages where nobody can cut away. Romvari got the best out of her by asking for less. We would like to see a director try asking for more, and find out whether this mother can lose her temper.
Biography
Iringó Réti is a Romanian-Hungarian actress. Born in 1977 in Târgu Mureș, Romania, she grew up in Hungary after her family emigrated there in 1988. She trained at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest.
Réti is based in Berlin and has worked in film, theatre and performance art. She has been an ensemble member at the Maxim Gorki Theater and has collaborated with the Buharov Brothers on several projects. She is noted for her role as the mother in Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron (2025), a Canadian-Hungarian co-production.
Her other screen credits include appearances in the series Halo (2022) and Hungarian productions such as Melegvizek országa (2022) and Hi Fonyód! (2013).
