Trees are Watching

Darya (Eva Green), a writer obsessed with the spiritual resonance of trees, returns to her hometown of Mardin with her deaf daughter and grows haunted by past memories of Spin and Nihal, twin sisters she knew as a child.

Residing in their former family home — which is bordered by mass deforestation save for an ominous pair of trees planted for each sister — Darya’s unease is suddenly exacerbated by nightly visitations of a malignant entity that takes a seemingly benign form: a chair made from local timber. Soon ruminating on her checkered relationship with Spin and Nihal, the latter of whom claimed to be terrorized by a similarly fearsome fixture, specifically a maternal witch said to lurk in the home’s noisy toilet, Darya’s sanity begins to wane.

Cannily blending psychological horror with local myth, Kurdish-Iranian new wave auteur Bahman Ghobadi explores humanity’s often unharmonious relationship with the natural world with his signature emotional humanism, but also a remarkably playful proclivity for the tropes and traditions of supernatural horror. Across surreal set pieces that ebb with heightened phantasmagoric stylization and sometimes full-blown Grand Guignol spectacle — particularly in a thrilling sequence that recalls the American Final Destination series — Ghobadi conjures a unique flavour of terror, enriched with nuanced philosophy and a deeply personal dimension.

Elevated by an extraordinary performance by Green, who is further supported by an exceptional cast of child actors expertly directed by Ghobadi, Trees are Watching is a mesmerizing confluence of a total filmmaker’s propensity for both the provocative and poignant, as well as the funny and frightening.

PETER KUPLOWSKY

Content advisory: explicit violence, accident trauma, bullying, mature themes