Filmmaking has always been a deeply anthropocentric act. A camera is, by design, an extension of the human eye pointed at the world, translating human experiences through the limited perspective of its operator. Even when filmmakers turn their lens toward the nonhuman, they often can’t help but project human drama onto it, thereby relegating the natural environment to the background. Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend, however, is a rare and remarkable example of a film actively resisting that instinct by wrestling with the question of whether the nonhuman can be given true narrative agency.
A century-spanning triptych, Silent Friend is set in a botanical garden of a medieval German university town, tracing a millennium through the eyes of a single ginkgo tree, silently witnessing human struggles across three distinct time periods. Enyedi’s meditation on the natural world and our fleeting role within it is shot across camera formats to reflect each era, echoing the technological advances of its era while visually emphasizing the passing of time.
At first glance, each chapter focuses on people–their ambitions, rivalries, loves, and failures. Yet beneath these dramas runs a far more effective current through the presence of plants subtly shaping the events at hand. These silent companions don’t simply decorate Enyedi’s frames; they shape the narrative trajectory of each character. In one era, a young woman, brilliant but constrained by the prejudices of her time, applies to an all-male scientific research institution with a groundbreaking understanding of plant behavior. Decades later, a young man tends to a solitary geranium wired to sensors, its physiological responses to environmental stimuli rendered as machinic data. And in the present day, a neurology professor, trapped on campus during the COVID lockdown, attempts to “brain-scan” a tree, an experiment that hovers between exotic lockdown behavior and radical scientific inquiry.
With the patience required of watching a plant blossom over time, Enyedi’s true intentions slowly reveal themselves in these threads. In each segment, she presents a technological advancement and a plant, which are met with a uniquely human obstacle. In the earliest chapter, patriarchal constraints deny the young woman access to the education her mind deserves, stifling the potential of her ideas before they can take root. In the middle chapter, jealousy blooms between two men competing for the same woman’s attention, threatening to uproot a delicate experiment. And in the final chapter, political isolationism and mistrust complicate collaboration as a maintenance worker, separated by both language and ideology, who resists participation in a study he cannot fully understand.
Through these conflicts, Silent Friend quietly argues that the greatest barriers to progress are not technological limitations, but human ones. Knowledge falters not because the natural world refuses to reveal its secrets, but because we are too blinded by ego, desire, and fear to perceive them clearly. Enyedi’s ginkgo tree, steadfast and silent, becomes a living symbol of this human pattern. It has witnessed the ongoing self-destructive plague toward understanding and coexisting with the world around us.
The film’s focus on plants is not merely symbolic. Enyedi takes great care to represent them as entities with their own modes of perception and communication. Plants do not see as we do; they are creatures that perceive the world through entirely different mechanisms. They sense through photoreceptors scattered across their bodies that creep toward the gaze of the sun, and they register touch, damage, and invisible threats without a comparable central nervous system to humans. And yet they are here, woven into the fabric of our daily lives – the food on our tables, the fibers on our backs, the air in our lungs – all thanks to their coexistence with us on our planet.
Despite this intimacy, we suffer from what Enyedi calls “plant blindness,” a refusal to acknowledge the quiet, nonjudgmental companions that make our existence possible. In her version of storytelling, plants are not passive scenery but active participants. They influence human choices and histories, their presence subtly guiding the flow of events. Visually, Enyedi breaks free from cinema’s anthropocentric mold with deliberate, patient precision. The plants are photographed with the same intimacy and reverence as her human characters. The human and nonhuman coexist within the frame, neither dominating the other. By structuring the film around both their interactions and their disconnect, Enyedi reframes the way we think about storytelling itself. Even the credits carry a sly nod of gratitude to the greenery that participated in the film.
With Silent Friend, Enyedi recognizes that we are not alone on this planet. We have inhabited it, altered it, and will leave it behind all within the blink of an eye on our planet’s timeline. In all that time, species like the gingko tree will have seen it all – our progressions and our failures, our evolutions and our self-destructions. When progress falters, it is rarely because of flawed machines or flawed plants, but because of flawed people. A deeply enchanting exploration of ecology and spirituality, Silent Friend reminds us, with quiet force, that we are not the only ones here, that our stories are a small part in a much longer story. Enyedi has not only made a film about plants, but a film that dares, for a moment, to think like one, to feel like one, and to see like one.
Review Courtesy of Danny Jarabek
Feature Image Courtesy of TIFF