Silent Friend Film Review: ASMR Fever Dream

Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend is a transfixing film that will grab your attention for its entire runtime and envelop every inch of every one of your senses.

Silent Friend refers not to a person, but to a ginkgo biloba tree situated on the campus of a German university. Across three time periods (1908, 1972, 2020), Enyedi guides us through different experiences of the people and nature surrounding said tree, and how they each connect to one another. The specific plotlines of each era are good and always watchable, but are most certainly the weakest element of Silent Friend. Indeed, Enyedi seems less concerned with building characters or writing complex stories; she is more interested in the titular tree, and in a broader sense, the world we inhabit.

From the off, Silent Friend is an encapsulating affair. Enyedi and her DOP Gergely Pálos (About Endlessness) exquisitely capture the main characters within environments, framing them in wide shots amidst the looming natural world or against the backdrop of human architecture. These moments especially feel akin to Kogonada’s searingly beautiful Columbus (2017). Enyedi also utilises natural light, shadows, and silhouettes impressively, either to create a sense of wonder or melancholy. Károly Szalai’s (On Body and Soul) editing cleverly intercuts between each story, even making for moments of humour.

Each story touches on different things: there is the sexism that Grete (Luna Welder, Blue My Mind) faces as the only female student university in the early 1900s; there is a will they, won’t they romance-of-sorts in the 70s between Gundula (Marlene Burow, Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything) and Hannes (Enzo Brumm, Der Onkel); and Dr. Tony Wong’s (Tony Leung, In the Mood for Love) isolated experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Silent Friend runs at nearly 150-minutes, but the character development is lacking, although never a real issue. As mentioned, Enyedi is more concerned about how these characters slot into the natural order, rather than sketching anything deeply personal to any of them. In fact, the tree itself feels like the main character, and the one we get to know most intimately.

Clever colour grading distinguishes the eras without being too jarring. Simple black-and-white for 1908 seamlessly moves to crackly, hazy tones of the 1970s, right up to the clean and clear vision of 2020. Connecting each tale in Silent Friend is the ginkgo tree. Enyedi carefully centres the plant at the centre of the film, always bringing our attention back to this natural behemoth and frequently shooting from its point-of-view. It gives us a connection to the tree, and more widely to the natural world depicted on screen.

Simply put, Silent Friend is a towering technical achievement. Its sound design is some of the most impressive of the year and gives us countless moments of glorious ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), further aided by Gabor Keresztes (Comrade Drakulich) and Kristóf Kelemen’s ethereal original score. Silent Friend ends in a very loose, ambiguous way, but the conclusion suits the film’s main aim of capturing the deep, dark, beautiful mystery of planet earth and human nature. No easy answers are offered by Enyedi, and because of this, both film and audience are enriched.

Silent Friend will be screened at the BFI London Film Festival on 17-18 October, 2025.