Christopher Rhoten
Don’t let the pseudoscientific woo-woo of Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend scare you off. Even if the Hungarian director’s latest movie fails to convince you that plants experience life in their own silent, unquantifiable way, the attempt will likely prove sensual, mystifying, and thought-provoking. Either way, the film will leave something growing in the viewer’s mind.
It is fitting that May 2026 marks the fifteenth anniversary of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, another film that explores the human condition across time and space through botanical metaphor. What separates Silent Friend from that film, or, say, Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, is that Enyedi’s dream remains grounded in a recognizable reality, even as it suggests perception exists on a spectrum.
The triptych story is set across three timelines (the early 1900s, the 1970s, and 2020) and a single location in Marburg, Germany. The only “character” who appears in all three is a large, imposing Ginkgo Biloba tree. Throughout history, the tree witnesses multiple outsiders attempting to fit in despite being in the wrong place at the wrong time—much like the ginkgo itself, a female specimen isolated beside the university, longing for pollination it cannot receive. That part isn’t the woo-woo, by the way.
The frame story follows Tony Leung’s Dr. Wong, a neuroscientist who travels to teach at Marburg’s local university before COVID-19 shuts down his class. Bored and alone, he happens upon the studies of Dr. Alice Sauvage (Léa Seydoux, appearing exclusively through curiously high-resolution Zoom calls), who proposes the idea that plants feel, think, and experience life in a way not dissimilar to our own. Inspired, Wong begins his own investigations into the Ginkgo, even contacting Sauvage and securing her mentorship on the project. Unfortunately, he runs into resistance from the garden’s groundskeeper, who files a complaint that threatens to cut the scientist’s research (and daily tai chi exercises) short.
Dr. Wong isn’t the only local to take an interest in nature. In 1908, Luna Wedler’s Grete is trying to become the first female student at the university. She is introduced in an uncomfortable scene with the patriarchal professors, who attempt to belittle her based on her sex, using Christian Konrad Sprengel‘s work on plant fertilization as a springboard to inquire about her own love life. Though her composure results in admittance, her gender creates more dire issues back at home. Meanwhile, in the seventies, the aloof student Hannes (Enzo Brumm) bonds with a roommate who is conducting her own experiments on plant sentience, but his silent desire starts to shift the story into another genre.
You’ll have no problem recognizing which section you’re watching, thanks to impressionistic cinematography that clearly delineates each stop: black-and-white 35mm for Grete, fuzzy and saturated 16mm for the more sensorial era, and sleek, cool digital for the present. And that’s important, since the film jumps between timelines frequently, sometimes for only a few seconds, tangling these tales together like vines.
To say much more about any section will spoil the film, because even though the plots aren’t especially complex, the experience is wildly ambitious. Though the present-day section takes up most of the runtime, the movie unearths a truly wonderful sense of rhythm, cutting between sections and protagonists as the same music plays over familiar conversations. Even at two and a half hours, the film’s century-long conceits fly by.
Ildikó Enyedi made her English-language debut with the Seydoux-starring The Story of My Wife in 2021. Before that, she won the Golden Bear with 2017’s On Body and Soul, a similarly offbeat film about two people who meet in dreams, but as deer. Silent Friend explores many of the same themes. Just as the stories suggest that plants are more “alive” than we think, Enyedi demonstrates that human experience can fluctuate wildly. Across contrasting decades and volatile societal norms, the three protagonists all turn to nature to combat their loneliness and outsider status. It’s an absolutely pitch-perfect metaphor, unmistakably suited to cinema, as the shifting appearances, subject matter, and tonalities reflect how differently life can look from person to person, even if everyone longs for connection.
Sexuality also courses through Silent Friend, since reproduction is the clearest link between plant and man (or the furthest, if you’re Hannes). There are no scenes of lovemaking in the movie, but there are several intrusive montages of plants sprouting and flowers blooming. Are plants like the characters, or are the characters like plants—prisoners in an environment where they cannot make connections with others, doomed to wilt or grow silent?
Early on, Dr. Wong lectures his class about his studies of the preverbal infant brain, drawing on disputed but real-world concepts. He describes the “spotlight focus” found in adults, in which a single idea or topic is highlighted at the expense of the surrounding context. He also discusses “lantern” focus, a phenomenon in which babies engage with multiple stimuli simultaneously, seemingly able to take in the patterns and details of everything. Like the central Ginkgo tree, perhaps (the camera often positions itself from the “perspective” of its trunk), but also the viewer, who is privy to Enyedi’s century-long story all at once.
Indeed, it seems to always be technology that allows the characters to harness this information and become cognizant of similarities. Grete falls in love with photography, Hannes bonds with a geranium via his roommate’s machine, and Wong’s experiments allow him to discover that the wavelengths of the Ginkgo match his own while tripping, or something like that. Perhaps film is just another example. While the many, branching ideas of Silent Friend resist easy synthesis, applying Wong’s philosophy allowed me to appreciate this beautiful movie as one of the year’s best.
Wong tells his class that “Research is nothing else but a series of attempts to find metaphors for the phenomena of the world.” Our time with Enyedi’s lonely triumvirate presents compelling evidence that life takes many forms. Water that houseplant, kids.
