Silent Friend movie review: A wonderful, meditative film about communing with a tree

In most of the films playing in cinemas this year, they’ve leaned towards overstimulation.

On big screens around the world, there are horrors unfolding, space aliens to fear or adore, and cartoon video game characters getting up to shenanigans.

It can all get a bit too much, but there seems to be this perception that audiences always want more, more and more, as if every inch of every frame is a little blinking neon sign. Look over here! Isn’t it all just so exciting?!

Silent Friend is the opposite. It’s meditative and patient, and it wants viewers to do what every therapist and wellness advocate is saying: slow down, smell the flowers and feel the grass between your toes.

The mostly German-language film is, sort of, about a tree.

It’s not so much about a tree as three people who have encountered the same gingko biloba tree within the grounds of a botanical garden in Marburg University. There’s a reciprocity between the person and the tree, where this gift from nature has changed them, and they wonder if the mere act of observing it can make an impact too.

That sounds kind of woo-woo, but this wonderful film by Hungarian filmmaker Ildiko Enyedi, which won a slew of awards at the Venice Film Festival last year, is pulsing with emotion, even though it’s subtle and stealthy.

It’s not immediately clear what Silent Friend is going to be, but by the time you’re a third of the way in, you’re enraptured by the poignant textures of its stories and its characters.

The film is set over three eras – in 1908, 1972 and 2020.

The 2020 timeline is the overarching framework, and it’s centred on Tony Wong (Tony Leung), a Hong Kong-based neuroscientist and visiting professor who becomes stuck on campus as the only person along with a disapproving caretaker when the first Covid lockdown sends everyone else home.

Tony normally works with humans, specifically babies, to map their neural responses before they can speak and communicate. In this gingko tree planted on the grounds, he hypothesises that it too can “feel” something, and works remotely with a French professor (Lea Seydoux) to measure the tree’s inner spectrum.

In 1908, Grete (Luna Wedler) is a talented botanist who becomes the first female student enrolled in the course, despite the misogynistic attempts to keep her out. She is mostly ostracised by her peers, and kicked out by her puritanical landlady, but discovers through the gingko, a different purpose and way of looking at the world and herself.

In 1972, a young man, Hannes (Enzo Brumm), arrives at the university from a rural community and becomes confused but enmeshed in the student politics of the era. But what he’s really fascinated by is the student living above him, a young woman trying to measure if her geranium has feelings.

Each of the characters are isolated in different ways, not quite of their environment, just like the gingko tree, a female of the species planted on its own, which means it will never flower. It stands there, tall and alone, but throughout its time, these three people find a form of communion with it.

The performances are wonderful. Wedler has so much spark as Grete, who is expected to hold her thoughts to herself if she even dares to have any, while Leung’s tender portrayal is magnetising.

Enyedi shoots each segment in a different style – 35mm black and white for 1908, 16mm colour for 1972, and digital crispness for 2020 – and they’re so visually distinct as to evoke different responses from the viewer, while being undeniably beautiful to look at too.

Even though it looks different, the overwhelming feeling is that they’re all connected, not just through the gingko but to this idea that being alone is not loneliness, that even if you’re isolated, you’re still part of something bigger.

Silent Friend plays with all these ideas in a film that doesn’t impose or demand, but it does present, and it gives you permission to take a moment.

Rating: 4/5

Silent Friend is in cinemas