The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that “if a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” That our references and experiences of the world are so different that even a shared language could not allow humans to commune with an animal.
In Ildikó Enyedi’s “Silent Friend,” communication between plants and people lies far beyond words, but it is perhaps possible to connect with them more profoundly than we previously assumed. Her cinema has never been content with surfaces, instead preferring to peer beneath the everyday
Never a filmmaker content with surfaces, her Enyedi has always been about peering underneath the everyday and finding something curious. Her 2017 Golden Bear winner “On Body and Soul” married tenderness with surrealism in a love story set around, of all places, a slaughterhouse, while “The Story of My Wife” wrestled with love blossoming out of initial callous indifference. Her latest, “Silent Friend,” premiering in competition at Venice 2025 before moving on to Toronto, extends this fascination with the invisible — this time, through the unlikely vantage point of a ginkgo tree.
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The premise is deceptively simple. A single tree in a German university town serves as silent witness to a century of human longing. The film is structured as a triptych: in 1908, Grete (Luna Wedler), the school’s first female student faces near constant misogyny, discovers the universal patterns of life hidden in plants through her black-and-white photography. In 1972, Hannes (Enzo Brumm), a gangly farm boy adrift in a hedonistic haze of hormones and counterculture, stumbles upon a revelation through his contact with a love interest’s geranium. And in 2020, Tony Leung plays Tony, a Hong Kong neuroscientist specializing in babies who, during the enforced silence of the COVID lockdown, experiments in a new field of botany that could force communion with the ginkgo itself.
It’s a bold structure, and Enyedi makes it even more distinctive by shooting each era in a carefully composed style: 35-millimeter monochrome for Grete’s rigidly ordered world, lush 16mm for Hannes’s impressionistic haze, and sharp digital clarity for Tony’s solitude. This tripartite structure gives “Silent Friend” a rigor that makes time itself another character. The giant ginkgo doesn’t change much, but everything around it does, and Enyedi seems determined to show us how fragile, and culturally contingent our idea of reality, really is.
Yet for all of its conceptual richness, “Silent Friend” is also a film prone to indulgence. Enyedi has often made meditative cinema, but here her restraint in some sequences verges on suffocating. Entire passages seem content to let us watch leaves rustle, characters linger, or silence stretch far beyond narrative necessity. She clearly wants us to sink into the slowness of “tree-time,” but there’s a thin line between contemplative and inert. At 147 minutes, the film occasionally crosses it, settling into rhythms more punishing than profound.
What continually saves it — and this is hardly a suprise — is Tony Leung. At this point in his career, Leung doesn’t need to prove anything, but he proves everything anyway. Enyedi reportedly wrote the role specifically for him, and it shows. This is less a performance than a presence: a study in silence, longing, and grace. With barely a handful of lines, roaming around the pandemic-emptied university halls, Leung communicates galaxies. The way he tilts his head, watches the only passerby he’s likely to see that day through a cafeteria window, or simply shares screen space with a tree carries a truly heartbreaking portrayal of loneliness.
Few performers embody the old-school charisma of international art cinema quite like him. He recalls the aloof elegance of Alain Delon or the masculine grace of Marcello Mastroianni, but with a warmth and melancholy that are uniquely his. “Silent Friend” may revolve around a tree, but it is Leung who convinces you that the tree is worth examination.
The supporting cast makes their mark, if less indelibly. Luna Wedler makes Grete a formidable and fiercely intelligent character, particularly in one sharp-witted confrontation against a panel of sneering professors who want to belittle and humiliate her; her black-and-white sequences, inspired by the photography of Karl Blossfeldt, are also the most striking in the film. Enzo Brumm, in his first major role, captures the awkward, floating energy of a youthful uncertainty and first love. And Léa Seydoux, in a brief but potent turn as a scientist of plant communication who remotely mentors Tony is magnetic as ever. She and Leung’s contact is virtual, but Seydoux’s charisma is strong enough to bridge the gap and give the pair a tender chemisty.
There’s a compelling shift in power dynamics over the 112 years the film covers, where women are valued only for their chastity, only to become subversive, sexually empowered scientists performing cutting-edge experiments, or delivering TED Talks and mentoring other scientists at the top of their game.
Still, no matter how much Seydoux sparkles or Wedler steadies, this is Leung’s film. The ginkgo may be the titular “silent friend,” but the most moving silence belongs to him. His performance transforms the movie from an intellectual exercise into a work of genuine feeling. Without him, “Silent Friend” would risk being remembered as a handsome, cerebral curio. With him, it becomes something more: a haunting meditation that lingers in the mind even as the pacing tests one’s patience.
Enyedi’s direction remains admirable for its ambition, drawing inspiration from Thomas Nagel’s famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and neuroscientist Anil Seth’s work on consciousness, framing human life as a shared hallucination that nature quietly resists. But whether these ideas resonate will depend largely on one’s tolerance for the subdued.
In the end, “Silent Friend” is a film of contradictions, profound, complex, and beautiful, but occasionally interminably boring. Still, Tony Leung commands the screen with such economy of gesture, such magnetic stillness, such sheer star power. And while that ginkgo will hopefully live for another 112 years, legacies like his have the power to extend even further.
Grade: B
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