Review of Silent Friend (2025)
Seen in 2026.
Across a century and a half, three people change in the face of some difficulty, all of them in the shadow of the same ginkgo tree in the gardens of the University of Marburg, central Germany.
It’s a fun idea to build a conventional-looking dramatic feature film around Weltanschauung, where the three main characters never meet or learn of one another’s existence. The best story is chronologically the first, where the first woman ever admitted as a student to the university’s biology department approaches the main theme by learning photography, as in Everlasting Moments (2008). The second story, set in the 1960s, undermines the whole film by telling the lie that a geranium will recognize a human being from 100 feet away. The script’s concept of plants perceiving the world around them is skewed as human-centred, making it a fantasy.