The Mesmerizing Silent Friend Will Make You Want to Talk to Your Plants

Silent Friend is the kind of film that will make you start talking to your plants. In Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s meditative drama, three people in three different eras explore the sentience of flora, each timeline connecting to the others through a gingko tree that’s been growing since 1832 in the botanical gardens adjacent to Marburg University in Germany. That sounds like an odd thing to make a movie about, but the film is in fact odder: Built around silences and the steady accumulation of human and natural detail, the story feels at times as if it’s being told by the tree itself: omniscient, unflinching, yet shot through with an almost alien tenderness.
Its perspective is not so much Olympian as it is pointillist.

Chief among these characters is Tony Leung’s Professor Wong, a Hong Kong neurologist researching childhood brain activity, who arrives in Marburg and quickly finds himself stuck under COVID-19 lockdown. Already feeling out of place, he is suddenly the sole inhabitant of the empty university, his only occasional companion a watchful janitor, Anton (Sylvester Groth), whose suspicions grow when Wong begins to conduct neurological experiments on the gingko tree. Enyedi intercuts Wong’s tale with that of Grete (Luna Wedler), the sole female student studying botany at Marburg in 1908. During her oral application to the department, Grete is quizzed by her piggish professors about plant reproductive systems; they use increasingly sexual terms, hoping to provoke a response, perhaps as a way of disqualifying her. Completing the triptych is the story of yet another student in 1972, the shy Hannes (Enzo Brumm), who hopes to study poetry but is soon taken with the lovely Gundula (Marlene Burow), who is researching the neural responses of the geranium on her windowsill. Raised on a farm and wanting nothing more to do with plants, Hannes nevertheless agrees to take care of Gundula’s flower while she’s away. Soon, he’s wowed by just how much the geranium seems to be aware of. 

On a purely factual level, you may not always buy all of what Silent Friend is selling, but throughout, Enyedi uses cinematic technique to fuse science with pseudoscience. The gingko tree is ever present, a fixed and almost divine presence. We glimpse its subterranean network of roots and tendrils glow and quiver with recognition at the sounds and footfalls of the world above. It’s all so beautiful that we want to believe: The vitality of this sunken, shimmering universe contrasts movingly with the tense rhythms of human life, particularly in Wong’s empty days as he wanders about the impeccably clean and blank spaces of the university, unsure what to do with himself. As an actor, Leung has always been a master of silences, whether he’s being stoic, compassionate, wounded, or hopelessly repressed. Here, he becomes something of an everyman. We can already relate to his alienation as an outsider unversed in the food and language of this town; then he’s trapped in a world frozen by pandemic lockdowns, and his awkwardness suddenly feels dead-on, as does his standoffish relationship with the curious, concerned Anton.

This is a movie about the ways in which we communicate and often fail to. Between Wong and Anton there is a cultural, psychological, and linguistic chasm — and yet it’s one they can clearly bridge once they decide they want to. Frustrated with her treatment at school and turned away from her lodgings due to a wild misunderstanding, Grete discovers a photography studio and learns this technology that allows her to express herself in an entirely new way. Hannes becomes obsessed with training the geranium to respond to music, to recognize his presence, and to unlock doors; he becomes closer to that plant than he is to the humans around him, even to Gundula. Enyedi seems to suggest that communication and openness to the world is our natural state of being, one that we share with the other lifeforms around us. Faced with that reality, our inability to relate to one another becomes almost obscene. 

On its surface, Silent Friend should be a “slow” movie. It clocks in at 147 minutes, it has long passages in which nothing of consequence seems to happen, and it’s filled with discussions of neuroscience and botany. And yet it’s mesmerizing. Enyedi, a veteran director whose 1989 debut My 20th Century was a small arthouse phenomenon back in the day, and whose 2017 film On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear at Berlin and was nominated for an Oscar, understands her audience the way a scientist understands their subject. She slows her movie’s rhythms down so that we become attuned to the slightest of gestures and expressions, to the particular delivery of a line, or even a word. The gingko tree at the picture’s center — majestic, beautiful, seen from different angles and in varying lights — becomes emblematic of our reflective state of mind. As we watch these characters forge on with the simple challenges of their lives, we feel as if we’ve tapped into a more elemental state of being, one that transcends mere human endeavor. It’s an unforgettable film.