The most intriguing movie star of 2026 is a 200-year-old tree.
The tree is a ginkgo biloba, which has been growing on the campus of Marburg University since 1832. It has stood silent witness to generations of students, all of whom have been born, matriculated, lived full lives, and returned to the earth, all while the tree has continued to grow. What could this tree tell us if it could talk? More importantly: can it talk?
This is the central question behind Silent Friend, the fascinating, unclassifiable new film from Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi. Through a mix of pop psychology, dream logic, and gorgeous cinematography, Enyedi explores the limits not only of plant consciousness, but humanity itself (that is, if there can be said to be a difference). The resulting film is strange, lovely, and altogether unique.
Befitting a film about a centuries-old organism, Silent Friend jumps between three distinct timeframes decades apart. The grounding narrative is of visiting neuroscientist Tony (the great Tony Leung) with the rotten luck of accepting tenure at Marburg right at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In near-total isolation (a particular handicap for one dedicated to the study of human behavior), the professor attempts to communicate with the tree, planting sensors by its roots and consulting via Zoom with an equally bored botanist (Lea Seydoux). His experiments are eccentric to say the least, but I’m willing to bet you did some stranger things during lockdown.
Meanwhile, it’s 1908. Marburg’s first female student, the brilliant Grete (Luna Wedler), enrolls in the school’s botany department, weathering the misogyny and condescension of the faculty while experimenting with the then-novel art of photography. And it’s also 1972, where a pair of hippie-ish students, Hannes and Gundula (Enzo Brumm and Marlene Burow), monitor the consciousness of a potted geranium, as well as the tenuous chemistry of their own will-they-won’t-they relationship. All seek refuge under the tree, an implicitly sympathetic presence in good times and bad.
We pass between the three storylines freely, sometimes within the same shot. Grete collapses onto its splitting trunk, for example and almost imperceptibly Tony will emerge from the shadows at the next cut. The three timelines are differentiated by cinematography: crisp black & white in 1908, saturated faux-16mm in the ‘70s, the warm glow which seems to naturally emanate around Tony Leung in 2020. Yet it never feels like we’re watching three different movies. As disparate as the three stories are, they are bound by the search for meaningful connection. Grete tries to carve a space for herself in a hostile, phallocentric world; Hannes tries to divine whether or not Gundula is into him (it’s a good thing the tree wasn’t a willow); Tony searches for any connection at all in a world which has seemingly shut itself off. These characters may be separated by centuries, but they’re bound by more than an old tree.
But then, there is the tree. One of Silent Friend’s niftiest tricks is the way in which it turns the gingko tree into its audience surrogate. We literally see the tree’s reactions during Tony’s story: when he throws up underneath it after a celebratory night at the bierhall, we follow his vomit through the dirt, trickling and intermingling with the tree’s roots. Later, when Tony fits it with sensors and diodes, we can see its brainwaves (rootwaves?) rendered in psychedelic colors. But there’s a subtle sense that we’re seeing the other stories through its eyes as well. The free association between the decades recalls the famous passages from Watchmen in which the godlike Dr. Manhattan experiences his entire life simultaneously. The gingko may not be omnipotent, but we can imagine how, living for centuries in a single place, time might become relative. The order in which the scenes are organized might not be linear, but it makes sense, in a dreamlike sort of way. This is the story as the tree sees it— and who are we to disagree?
Perhaps counterintuitively, one of the most satisfying aspects of Silent Friend is the way in which Enyedi stops short of giving us all the answers. There is no given explanation, for example, for a brief but pivotal scene in which Grete frolicks in the forest at dawn with some sort of pagan sisterhood of wood nymphs. Tony never comes to any hard and firm conclusion from his research; hell, we never even learn if Hannes and Gundula wind up doing it. Yet it never feels like we’re missing anything. Each of these stories is emotionally complete, and the points at which we leave their characters never feels unfulfilling. We know their lives continue— and the life of the tree continues longer still— but we see the parts we need to see.
A story, after all, is something different from a plot, though the two terms are frequently used interchangeably. This weekend also sees the release of The Mandalorian and Grogu, a film which is made almost entirely out of plot; its characters ping from one plot point on Planet A to the next on Planet B, its events captured in tablet-ready digital as perfunctorily as an evening newscast. Silent Friend, meanwhile, is a story, and Enyedi uses every cinematic tool available to make us feel it on a deeper level: gorgeous images unfolding languidly, all-encompassing noises which we understand to be the sound of a tree’s roots, even though we know consciously that a tree’s roots are silent. Silent Friend is very long and slow by design, but it’s never anything less than mesmerizing. For those willing to wind down their internal clock for a few hours, it’s among the very best films of the year. Now someone give that tree an Oscar.
Silent Friend
2025
dir. Ildikó Enyedi
147 min.
Opens Friday, 5/22 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
