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 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 cycle of technological advances while visually emphasizing the passing of time. 

At first glance, each chapter focuses on people–their ambitions, loves, and questions. But beneath these dramas runs a far more effective current through the presence of plants shaping the events at hand. These plants don’t just 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 clearly elevated eye for scientific research and discovery. Decades later, a young man is tasked with tending to a geranium wired to sensors that measures its physiological responses to environmental stimuli as quantitative 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.

Enyedi’s true intentions patiently reveal themselves between 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. In the middle chapter, jealousy between two men competing for the same woman’s attention threatens to derail the delicate experiment. And in the final chapter, political isolationism and mistrust complicate collaboration as a maintenance worker, separated by both language and ideology resists participation in a study he cannot fully understand.

Through these conflicts, Silent Friend argues that the greatest barriers to progress are not technological limitations, but human ones. The tools we use to observe and measure the world continue to advance but so too does the human feelings of ego, jealousy, and fear that hold us back from true progress. Enyedi’s all-seeing ginkgo tree becomes a symbol of this human pattern of self-destructive behavior preventing coexistence with the world around us.

Enyedi takes great care to represent the plants of the film as human equivalents with their own modes of perception and communication. 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 essential to our daily lives – the food on our tables, the fibers on our clothes, the air in our lungs – all thanks to their coexistence with us on our planet. 

Despite this relationship we have to plants, we suffer from what Enyedi calls “plant blindness,” a subconscious refusal to acknowledge their essential significance in our lives. In her version of storytelling, plants are active, aware participants that influence human choices and histories. Visually, Enyedi breaks free from cinema’s “human-eye” mold with deliberate, patient precision. The plants are photographed with the same reverence as her human characters. The human and nonhuman coexist within the frame, neither dominating the other. By structuring the film around both this symbiosis, 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. 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, wider story. It’s a film about plants, but it’s also 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