The thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein as soon as mentioned that “if a lion might converse, we couldn’t perceive him.” That our references and experiences of the world are so completely different that even a shared language couldn’t enable people to commune with an animal.
In Ildikó Enyedi’s “Silent Pal,” communication between crops and folks lies far past phrases, however it’s maybe potential to attach with them extra profoundly than we beforehand assumed. Her cinema has by no means been content material with surfaces, as a substitute preferring to see beneath the on a regular basis
By no means a filmmaker content material with surfaces, her Enyedi has all the time been about peering beneath the on a regular basis and discovering one thing curious. Her 2017 Golden Bear winner “On Physique and Soul” married tenderness with surrealism in a love story set round, of all locations, a slaughterhouse, whereas “The Story of My Spouse” wrestled with love blossoming out of preliminary callous indifference. Her newest, “Silent Pal,” premiering in competitors at Venice 2025 earlier than transferring on to Toronto, extends this fascination with the invisible — this time, by way of the unlikely vantage level of a ginkgo tree.
The premise is deceptively easy. A single tree in a German college city serves as silent witness to a century of human longing. The movie is structured as a triptych: in 1908, Grete (Luna Wedler), the varsity’s first feminine scholar faces close to fixed misogyny, discovers the common patterns of life hidden in crops by way of her black-and-white pictures. In 1972, Hannes (Enzo Brumm), a gangly farm boy adrift in a hedonistic haze of hormones and counterculture, stumbles upon a revelation by way of his contact with a love curiosity’s geranium. And in 2020, Tony Leung performs Tony, a Hong Kong neuroscientist specializing in infants who, throughout the enforced silence of the COVID lockdown, experiments in a brand new discipline of botany that would power communion with the ginkgo itself.
It’s a daring construction, and Enyedi makes it much more distinctive by taking pictures every period in a rigorously composed model: 35-millimeter monochrome for Grete’s rigidly ordered world, lush 16mm for Hannes’s impressionistic haze, and sharp digital readability for Tony’s solitude. This tripartite construction offers “Silent Pal” a rigor that makes time itself one other character. The enormous ginkgo doesn’t change a lot, however all the pieces round it does, and Enyedi appears decided to indicate us how fragile, and culturally contingent our thought of actuality, actually is.
But for all of its conceptual richness, “Silent Pal” can be a movie liable to indulgence. Enyedi has usually made meditative cinema, however right here her restraint in some sequences verges on suffocating. Complete passages appear content material to allow us to watch leaves rustle, characters linger, or silence stretch far past narrative necessity. She clearly desires us to sink into the slowness of “tree-time,” however there’s a skinny line between contemplative and inert. At 147 minutes, the movie often crosses it, settling into rhythms extra punishing than profound.
What frequently saves it — and that is hardly a suprise — is Tony Leung. At this level in his profession, Leung doesn’t have to show something, however he proves all the pieces anyway. Enyedi reportedly wrote the function particularly for him, and it reveals. That is much less a efficiency than a presence: a research in silence, longing, and style. With barely a handful of strains, roaming across the pandemic-emptied college halls, Leung communicates galaxies. The way in which he tilts his head, watches the one passerby he’s more likely to see that day by way of a cafeteria window, or just shares display area with a tree carries a really heartbreaking portrayal of loneliness.
Few performers embody the old-school charisma of worldwide artwork cinema fairly like him. He remembers the aloof magnificence of Alain Delon or the masculine grace of Marcello Mastroianni, however with a heat and melancholy which are uniquely his. “Silent Pal” might revolve round a tree, however it’s Leung who convinces you that the tree is value examination.
The supporting forged makes their mark, if much less indelibly. Luna Wedler makes Grete a formidable and fiercely clever character, notably in a single sharp-witted confrontation towards a panel of sneering professors who need to belittle and humiliate her; her black-and-white sequences, impressed by the pictures of Karl Blossfeldt, are additionally probably the most placing within the movie. Enzo Brumm, in his first main function, captures the awkward, floating power of a youthful uncertainty and past love. And Léa Seydoux, in a short however potent flip as a scientist of plant communication who remotely mentors Tony is magnetic as ever. She and Leung’s contact is digital, however Seydoux’s charisma is robust sufficient to bridge the hole and provides the pair a young chemisty.
There’s a compelling shift in energy dynamics over the 112 years the movie covers, the place ladies are valued just for their chastity, solely to develop into subversive, sexually empowered scientists performing cutting-edge experiments, or delivering TED Talks and mentoring different scientists on the prime of their sport.
Nonetheless, irrespective of how a lot Seydoux sparkles or Wedler steadies, that is Leung’s movie. The ginkgo would be the titular “silent pal,” however probably the most transferring silence belongs to him. His efficiency transforms the film from an mental train into a piece of real feeling. With out him, “Silent Pal” would danger being remembered as a good-looking, cerebral curio. With him, it turns into one thing extra: a haunting meditation that lingers within the thoughts even because the pacing checks one’s persistence.
Enyedi’s route stays admirable for its ambition, drawing inspiration from Thomas Nagel’s well-known essay “What Is It Prefer to Be a Bat?” and neuroscientist Anil Seth’s work on consciousness, framing human life as a shared hallucination that nature quietly resists. However whether or not these concepts resonate will rely largely on one’s tolerance for the subdued.
Ultimately, “Silent Pal” is a movie of contradictions, profound, complicated, and delightful, however often interminably boring. Nonetheless, Tony Leung instructions the display with such financial system of gesture, such magnetic stillness, such sheer star energy. And whereas that ginkgo will hopefully stay for one more 112 years, legacies like his have the ability to increase even additional.
Grade: B
Wish to keep updated on IndieWire’s movie opinions and significant ideas? Subscribe right here to our newly launched e-newsletter, In Overview by David Ehrlich, by which our Chief Movie Critic and Head Evaluations Editor rounds up the very best new opinions and streaming picks together with some unique musings — all solely accessible to subscribers.