Rooted in nature, 'Silent Friend' will change the way you see the trees

Review Movie Reviews Rooted in nature, 'Silent Friend' will change the way you see the trees May 8, 202610:30 AM ET Justin Chang In Silent Friend, Hannes (Enzo Brumm) is profoundly transformed while caring for a plant. Lena Kettner/Pandora Film hide caption toggle caption Lena Kettner/Pandora Film Some movies will forever change the way you look at plants. Unsurprisingly, many of them are thrillers and science-fiction films, like Little Shop of Horrors, The Day of the Triffids, or, more recently, the mind-controlling flower freakout Little Joe. You could probably make a more sinister version of the new drama Silent Friend, which dares to suggest that the tree outside your door or the geranium on your windowsill might be studying you intently — and might even reach out, if it could, and tell you what it's thinking. But the Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi isn't interested in scaring us. She wants us to leave this movie feeling more connected to the natural world. Sponsor Message Silent Friend tells three separate stories, all set in different periods across more than a century, but rooted in the same location: the University of Marburg in Germany. First, we meet a neuroscientist named Tony, played by the Hong Kong star Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who's visiting the school as a guest researcher. It's 2020, and when COVID-19 hits, Tony is left stranded on a near-empty campus. Bored and lonely, he stumbles on some online videos featuring a French botanist, Alice, played by Léa Seydoux, and is captivated by her theory that plants have a highly developed consciousness. Inspired, Tony plans an experiment and gets in touch with Alice via Zoom to ask for her guidance. Books We Love Happy Arbor Day! These 20 books will change the way you think about trees Tony's experiment involves attaching electronic sensors to the leaves and trunk of a nearly 200-year-old ginkgo biloba tree and studying the resulting data to see what, if anything, the plant might be trying to communicate. In a w...