Consciousness, the kindly Professor Wong (Tony Leung) explains, takes many shades. As infants, we see the world as if lit by lantern, its glow spilling in every direction, our senses wide open. With age, that lantern narrows to a spotlight, fixing both our gaze and understanding. Those craving that early state can turn to psychedelics — “babies are high all the time,” Wong jokes — or, failing that, to Ildikó Enyedi’s enrapturing “Silent Friend.”
Just ask the audience that drifted out of its Venice premiere on a contact buzz, dizzy and eager to linger in that blissful glow.
For long before Wong chomps his own psilocybin, “Silent Friend” plays like a movie on mushrooms, all the way down to a puzzling first hour that makes you wonder if the trip will ever kick in. Rest assured, nothing is wasted; every element pays off in a film that cycles through natural communion and human connection with elegant intuition. By the time it hits full stride — loosening, sharpening, blooming into light euphoria — the lantern-like film connects images and ideas across time and space, leaving a feeling of pure grace.
A crunchier cousin to the Cannes-acclaimed “Sound of Falling,” Enyedi’s mostly German-language film traces a century of quiet reverberations from a single location. Its anchor is a majestic Ginkgo biloba, nearly 200 years old, standing sentinel in the garden of a Teutonic university.
In 1908, Grete (Luna Wedler), the school’s first female student, steadies herself on its bark after acing a viciously sexist admissions interview. In 1972, housemates Hannes (Enzo Brumm) and Gundula (Marlene Burow) circle it in the midst of their flirtation. And in the spring of 2020, the visiting professor-turned-pandemic-refugee Wong seeks solace beneath its shade, alone with his thoughts during lockdown.
Before its themes and motifs begin to echo and intertwine, the film establishes a distinct visual style for each period, shifting between moody black-and-white, bleary celluloid and crisp digital cinematography to follow three generations of academics, each striving to understand the natural world with the tools at their disposal. Grete wields an early camera, turning a tricky set of circumstances — too tangled to explain in full, but yes, it involves the tree — into a means to study nature’s patterns. Those patterns, in turn, shape the story itself, as when her photography mentor’s lesson in lighting later mirrors Wong’s analogy for consciousness, delivered on the same campus more than a century later (but among the first scenes in a film of chopped-and-screwed chronology).
Grete seeks to observe the verdant sphere, while the two parallel strands use faint sci-fi to embellish the idea of the observable world observing us. Fast forward a few decades, and Hannes is making discoveries with the aid of a polygraph machine. Closer to the present, the idle Wong — stranded on campus with travel shut down and his research paused — presses his neuron sensors against the bark of his silent friend. After all, what use are they if they just sit collecting dust? (This also echoes a line from Grete’s mentor about the camera he gives her: nothing in the film is gratuitous, and everything loops back, reverberating in unexpected ways.)
Working from her own script, Enyedi sets herself a central challenge: to strip the phrase “We’re being watched” of all fear and paranoia, and turn “They’re listening” into the most tender expression imaginable. She succeeds beyond measure — particularly in a standout sequence where Hannes’ increasingly outlandish behavior produces noticeable results from the fuchsia hooked to his polygraph. The Venice audience erupted, laughing partly at the silliness of the setup, but mostly at the directorial payoff. In shot-reverse-shot, through the most basic magic of the cinematic tool, the damn flower seems to genuinely emote.
Indeed, the filmmaker takes her subject seriously enough to mine it for laughs. “Silent Friend” may never be a full-on comedy, but it delights in magnifying human peccadilloes to slyly comic effect — especially when trailing German science nerds more adept at physics than flirting. Few other contexts could land a punchline like, “Want to come upstairs and look at my geranium?” — or, for that matter, wring such hope from Léa Seydoux’s deadpan offer to “send over some sperm.”
True to the scientific process (and to the film’s wider structure), Paris-based Alice Sauvage (Seydoux) picks up the mantle, pushing the once-fledgling field of botanical psychology into the spotlight — and onto the stage of a TED Talk that Wong streams to fill his endless hours. He sparks immediately to the presentation and its presenter, launching a Zoom correspondence too ardent to be strictly professional. The feeling seems wholly reciprocal, but don’t expect this delightfully idiosyncratic film to settle into convention — even if Wong’s hunger for human connection is resolved in a deeply satisfying way before the film culminates in the arboreal equivalent of a kiss. (Well, let’s be honest: closer to an orgasm. But we’ll keep things decent.)
Equally convincing as romantic or rogue, Leung has rarely built a character so squarely on his innate decency. Wong is compelling from his very first appearance, revealing a side of the actor we’ve never seen before: a silly streak, as the professor conducts a cognition test with sock puppets before an infant. Gone are the telltale hints of inner conflict that defined so many of his signature roles. Here, the self-contained man holds a universe within while staying deeply attuned to the world around him, his intellectual curiosity flowing naturally from love and compassion.
Which circles back to the film-as-trip. Enyedi doesn’t rely on strobing lights or kaleidoscopic clichés; she isn’t angling for a mind f-ck freakout. Instead, she builds toward — and then locks into — a wavelength of heightened receptivity, recreating the leaps-beyond-logic and visceral curiosity of an altered state. Wong calls that lantern-like consciousness, before describing the wider scientific process as a system of symbols and hypotheses meant to grasp at the sprawling unknowability of the universe. Which, of course, is also the description of art.
