Silent Friend (2025)
Silent Friend, Ildikó Enyedi’s triptych about a ginkgo tree and the three lives that orbit it across a century, asks the audience to do something close to extinct at the pictures these days: sit down, shut up, and watch a plant for two and a half hours. It mostly rewards the patience it demands.
The film sits in three eras, all tethered to the same tree in the botanical gardens of a German university town. 1908: a young woman claws her way into a botany faculty built to keep her out. 1972: a student drifts through hormones and hedonism until a housemate’s geranium, of all things, rearranges his priorities. 2020: a Hong Kong neuroscientist, played by Tony Leung with a stillness that would put most actors out of a job, spends a locked-down pandemic winter wondering whether the tree outside his window is paying attention back. The three strands rhyme rather than touch, and Enyedi leaves the connecting to you.
Cinematographer Gergely Pálos changes film stock with each era: black and white 35mm for 1908, grainy 16mm for the seventies, clean digital for the present. The looseness of that seventies grain seems to carry the era’s permissiveness inside the film stock itself, which is a cleverer trick than most directors bother attempting.
Leung is the film’s strongest card. His performance is a study in sitting with uncertainty rather than fixing it, which is not a skill cinema tends to reward with close-ups. Léa Seydoux, playing the botanist who becomes his sparring partner over Zoom, brings a dry scepticism that keeps the film’s stranger ideas about plant consciousness from tipping into whimsy. There’s genuine comedy threaded through as well, including a campus caretaker whose slow thaw towards Leung’s character is one of the better pieces of physical comedy I’ve seen this year, achieved almost entirely through eyebrows.
The pace tests patience past the point of reward in the middle stretch, and Enyedi seems entirely unbothered by that risk. In my opinion she’s a little too pleased with her own restraint in places, mistaking slowness for depth more than once.
What lingers isn’t the plot but the suggestion underneath it, that the natural world has been trying to get our attention for longer than we’ve bothered giving it.