Silent Friend

Note: Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend was screened as part of the 45th Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. For the full lineup of films available between April 8-19, check out the schedule here. The film arrives in theaters on May 8, 2026. 

Before making Silent Friend, Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi seems to have read The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben’s 2015 book about the intricate, unseen social relationships that comprise what he calls the “wood wide web.” The author uncovers how trees send chemical and electrical signals through their secret network, warning one another about pests and other threats. They share resources, with healthier “mother” trees using their connections like a nervous system to assist their offspring, pumping nutrients to them to keep the wood wide web thriving. Wohlleben also explores how trees sleep and even remember hard times, such as droughts, allowing them to prepare for future problems. The tree community relies on its members growing naturally, so if trees are displaced, say, by humans planting them as part of urban forest management, they will not form a thriving culture that communicates as it should. They will be lonely, disconnected. Walking through the woods, Wohlleben suggests you can observe a functional society. Walking through a suburban neighborhood where trees line the streets, it’s like walking through a prison. 

Enyedi’s film takes a similar approach to trees and plant life. Her enigmatic triptych spans three timelines over more than a hundred years, with the only constant being the titular Ginkgo biloba tree planted in 1832 on the campus of a German university. In each story, a character tries to rethink what we know about plants, often to the confusion and skepticism of their respective scientific communities. To be sure, Wohlleben’s ideas have been criticized by some for anthropomorphizing plants, imbuing them with the characteristics of families and friendship. But his approach confronts the difficulty human beings have in seeing how life without observable behaviors could be analogous to their own. Trees communicate too slowly, too internally, for us to notice and understand with the naked eye. And yet, as one character in the film states in a lecture: Science is about asking questions and using metaphors to understand the world around us. And there’s a long history of dendrologists and botanists using human terminology to describe how plants function.

The full 1,700-word review is currently exclusive to Patreon subscribers. To read it, you can purchase individual access. Or you can join Deep Focus Review’s Patron community, where you’ll receive exclusive access to this and many other reviews, essays, and blogs published only on Patreon.

Patrons also get access to:

• A newsletter every Monday
• Streaming recommendations every Friday
• Polls to pick the movies reviewed on Deep Focus Review and Patreon
• Access to the open AMA and DFR Community