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Bahman Ghobadi directs some fascinating performances in “Trees Are Watching,” his horror movie based on the Kurdish legend of people being reborn as trees and living second lives as furniture. Not only does actress
Eva Green make a meal out of some paper-thin concepts, but her co-stars include some of the finest child actors you’re likely to see. This makes it all the more baffling and disappointing when much of the screen is filled with sloppy, A.I. generated dreck, exacerbating the film’s tonal and visual disconnects the further it goes on.
Perhaps it’s time for a moratorium on major festivals — like Toronto, where “Trees Are Watching” premiered in the Centerpiece section — programming films that use this technology, the ethics of which are questionable at best, given pervasive labor concerns and outright theft of copyrighted data and images. At the very least, there should be some kind of disclosure before audiences purchase tickets. It certainly doesn’t help when filmmakers like Martin Scorsese throw their weight behind such projects as executive producers, as is the case with Ghobadi’s latest.
The film begins with a flashback to three young Kurdish girls in Mardin, Turkey discussing the aforementioned superstition, before one of them, Darya (Green), returns years later from abroad with her Deaf, nonverbal daughter Connie (Neva Kuş) to perform anthropological research in the area. Kuş is a firecracker of a performer, adding lively dimensions to the chilling atmosphere when things go bump in the night, and Connie begins hearing strange, unsettling sounds through her hearing aid.
A pair of tall trees sway outside the home Darya has rented, a modern expansion of where her childhood friends Nihal and Spin used to live. Inside, Darya’s dog acts aggressively toward an ornately carved chair, which Connie soon claims has been moving on its own. Before long, the chair becomes a specter of sorts, seemingly possessed by a spirit from Darya’s past, which unravels in vivid flashbacks that don’t entirely seem motivated — they’re Nihal and Spin’s memories for the most part, not Darya’s — but which detail an intriguing backstory nonetheless.
The young sisters’ upbringing, by a troubled mother, mirrors Darya’s own struggles as a parent on some nebulous medication. But this tenuous thematic connection is never fully allowed to bloom, despite Green’s commitment to crafting emotional dimensions seemingly beyond what’s on the page. Instead, the film piles on other, wider flashbacks of anecdotes and whispers explaining the superstition, depicted entirely through A.I.-generated asides.
Before long, entire establishing shots and connective tissue begin to use this tech, especially for overhead shots of Darya’s car driving to the police station for safety, as she passes numerous trees being felled over lengthy stretches of road. It’s hard to take this gesture towards environmentalism seriously when it almost exclusively seems to employ technology known to sap inordinate amounts of water, doing environmental harm of its own.
Yet Ghobadi has a keen eye for performance and staging. The brilliant young actresses playing the sisters breathe eerie life into the flashback scenes, as a pair of lively young girls living under a domineering mother, and whose outlook is shaped by fearful beliefs about spirits occupying physical objects and modern spaces. When some of these ghostly figures appear before Darya in the present, the director and his cinematographers (Saba Mazloum, Touraj Aslani) frame conversations and confrontations in meaningfully uncanny ways, with over-the-shoulder shots transformed into over-the-scalp peeks that obscure characters’ mouths as they converse, creating a sense of mystery around not only hidden faces, but the reality of the dialogue we’re hearing.
However, all this may as well go out the window the further the film goes on, and the more Darya’s search for answers about her past plays out in the form of generative digital regurgitations with repulsive textures. These aren’t just unimaginative, but given Ghobadi’s obvious talents elsewhere, they’re anti-imaginative, robbing scenes of any and all human quality. The central, tongue-in-cheek terror of a demonic chair also becomes an object of complete self-seriousness in a way the movie cannot handle, further tugging at fraying aesthetic threads en route to numerous epilogues that repeatedly explain and clarify anything remotely mysterious.
Shots barely fit together as the film goes on, with anything except isolated closeups of human faces not only suspect, but downright insulting to watch, as “Trees Are Watching” becomes a product of typed-in prompts rather than real, intelligent artistry. It shouldn’t be incumbent on viewers to have to wade through something so offensively produced and assembled. Alas, it isn’t the first time such a faux pas has been excused on an international festival stage, and it likely won’t be the last.
