You’re probably used to movies where nature is just a background. A pretty forest for a car chase, or a stormy sky to show a character is sad. Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi completely flips this setup in her latest feature, Silent Friend. The movie doesn’t treat the environment like a prop. Instead, a single, ancient ginkgo tree in the German university town of Marburg is the actual anchor of the entire 147-minute story.
If you're looking for a fast-paced thriller, you won't find it here. This film demands that you slow down. It’s an ambitious, era-spanning triptych that links three different human lives across more than a century—1908, 1972, and 2020. What makes it work isn’t a series of dramatic plot twists, but the way it explores loneliness, scientific curiosity, and our clumsy attempts to talk to a world that doesn’t speak our language.
Three Eras Bound by a Single Living Fossil
Enyedi builds her narrative around three distinct characters who are all outcasts in their own eras. They don’t know each other, but they all share an obsession with the plant life inside the university’s botanical garden.
First, we go back to 1908. A young woman named Grete, played with a fierce energy by Luna Wedler, fights to become the university’s first female botany student. She faces blatant, exhausting sexism from an all-male admissions panel that uses Carl Linnaeus’s sexual classification system for plants to humiliate her. When the pressure peaks, she retreats to the botanical garden, finding a strange solace near the young ginkgo tree and turning to macro photography to document her world.
The film then jumps to 1972. The energy shifts to grainy 16mm film as campus political rebellion brews. We meet Hannes, a cynical farm boy who claims to hate plants. Despite his attitude, he ends up taking care of his crush's houseplant—a geranium hooked up to a polygraph-like machine that measures its reactions. What starts as a chore to impress a girl turns into a genuine obsession when he realizes the plant is actually responding to him.
Finally, we land in the isolation of early 2020. Tony Leung Chiu-wai plays Dr. Tony Wong, a neuroscientist from Hong Kong stranded on the empty campus during the initial COVID-19 lockdown. With his brain research halted, he spends his days tracking the electromagnetic signals of the centuries-old ginkgo tree. He connects online with a French botanist, played by Léa Seydoux, who helps him map his own brainwave activity directly against the tree’s internal electrical pulses.
The Shocking Reality of the Ginkgo Tree
To understand why Enyedi chose a ginkgo tree, you have to look at the actual science she's referencing. Ginkgos are living fossils. They don't have close living relatives, and they survived while their prehistoric natural enemies died out millions of years ago.
Interestingly, the ginkgo almost went extinct because its reproductive system is incredibly old-fashioned and inefficient compared to modern flowering plants. In nature, it’s a total loner. The only reason ginkgos thrive in modern cities today is that humans found them beautiful and planted them everywhere. They can handle heavy urban pollution and smoke without a problem.
This mirrors the human characters in Silent Friend. Every single one of them is an outcast trying to navigate a system that doesn't want them or understand them. Grete is isolated by her gender, Hannes by his class, and Tony by a global pandemic and a massive language barrier with his only neighbor, a grumpy campus caretaker. The tree isn’t just a witness; it’s a reflection of their isolation.
How Cinematography Recreates the Passage of Time
A massive issue with most time-traveling or multi-era films is that the transitions feel clunky or superficial. Silent Friend avoids this by letting the camera work tell the story. Cinematographer Gergely Pálos used entirely different technical formats to capture each era, giving every segment its own distinct texture.
- 1908: Shot on black-and-white 35mm celluloid film, creating an austere, historical atmosphere.
- 1972: Shot on highly saturated, grainy 16mm film that perfectly captures the gritty, rebellious aesthetic of the seventies.
- 2020: Shot digitally with crisp, cold tones that emphasize the eerie stillness of a locked-down world.
The film also uses mind-bending digital time-lapse photography, showing seeds splitting open and roots expanding. It forces you to watch nature move on its own timeline. As Enyedi pointed out during the film's release, humans live at a frantic pace with rapid heartbeats. Trees operate on a scale where a single inhale and exhale takes an entire day. The movie forces our frantic human eyes to sit still and adjust to that slower rhythm.
Moving Past Conventional Storytelling
A lot of casual moviegoers might find the deliberate pacing of Silent Friend tough to swallow. It runs nearly two and a half hours, and editor Károly Szalai frequently cuts between the timelines without warning. You might get a brief flash of Grete in 1908 right in the middle of Tony’s 2020 neurological experiments.
But if you give it your full attention, the payoff is massive. Instead of building toward a traditional Hollywood climax, the storylines spiral closer together, unified by the sound design and the steady presence of the tree. It’s an exercise in empathy. The film suggests that our current global conflicts and our disconnect from nature stem from the exact same flaw: our inability to recognize forms of communication that don’t look like our own.
If you want to experience cinema that challenges how you perceive life, don't miss Silent Friend while it’s in theaters. Skip the popcorn, turn off your phone, and let yourself get completely absorbed by a slower, older way of looking at the world.
