by Hudson Moura
Written and directed by Bahman Ghobadi, Trees Are Watching initially appears to belong to the horror genre, with supernatural presences, disturbing memories, and familiar moments of fear. Yet Ghobadi himself describes the film as essentially realistic, and that distinction is important. The horror does not exist simply to frighten us; it grows out of cultural beliefs, family trauma, environmental destruction, and the idea that nature may eventually respond to the violence inflicted upon it.
Eva Green plays Darya, who travels with her young daughter Connie to Mardin, Turkey, where she is conducting research for a book. Darya left the country for London when she was nine but has returned periodically. Her arrival brings her back into contact with memories of her childhood and particularly with two sisters, Spin and Nihal, with whom she spent considerable time as a girl. Their mother suffered from serious mental problems, leaving deep emotional scars on the sisters and on the world Darya remembers.
What gradually emerges is a universe in which the supernatural cannot easily be separated from memory or cultural belief. One of the ideas running through the film is that when people die, they become trees; later they become objects, and when those objects are burned, they finally disappear. The trees therefore acquire a much more complex presence than simple elements of the landscape. They contain memory, identity, the dead, and a continuity between human beings and nature.
From this belief comes the film’s most powerful question: what if the trees could take revenge? Ghobadi explained that while following news about forest fires and deforestation, he began imagining trees as beings unable to escape destruction—standing in place as fire approaches them one after another—and wondering what might happen if they could respond. In Trees Are Watching, that idea becomes both an environmental warning and the foundation for its horror.
The result is a film in which ecological destruction has an almost spiritual consequence. Burning forests and cutting down trees are not presented merely as environmental problems; if trees carry the presence of those who came before us, destroying them becomes an attack on memory and on humanity itself. The horror therefore comes not only from supernatural events, but from what human beings are already doing to the natural world.
This makes the film more interesting than a conventional ghost story. Ghobadi uses recognizable horror devices, but beneath them lies something connected to belief, cultural memory, grief, and inherited trauma. The frightening moments work because the supernatural belongs to the characters’ understanding of the world rather than feeling imposed simply to create suspense.
Objects also acquire an unusual importance. Ghobadi himself designed the distinctive chair that becomes almost another character in the film. Like the trees, it suggests that objects can contain histories, souls, and presences beyond their immediate function. The border between people, nature, objects, memory, and death becomes increasingly unstable.
The amazing performances of the children are incredibly effective, helping the supernatural world feel believable rather than artificial. Ghobadi’s direction depends considerably on faces, reactions, and the ability of the young performers to inhabit situations in which everyday reality and fear constantly overlap.
There is also something remarkable about the circumstances under which Trees Are Watching was made. Ghobadi, an Iranian filmmaker living and working in exile, shot the film in Turkey, and the production itself was interrupted by serious financial difficulties, forcing the team to shoot during two different periods. He spoke after the screening at TIFF26′ about the enormous difficulty of continuing to make independent cinema under these conditions, describing filmmaking almost as a constant struggle to find resources and freedom.
That struggle is reflected in his own understanding of cinema. Ghobadi spoke about the filmmaker’s responsibility not simply to look through an already existing window, but to break a new opening into the wall and create another way of seeing. Trees Are Watching clearly attempts precisely that: it combines horror, environmental anxiety, cultural belief, personal memory, and family trauma without fitting comfortably into a single genre.
The film may contain ghosts, supernatural events, and frightening images, but its deepest horror is ultimately very real. Forests burn. Trees disappear. People are displaced. Memories are lost. Families carry unresolved trauma across generations. By imagining that the trees themselves might be watching—and perhaps waiting to respond—Ghobadi transforms environmental destruction into something intimate, spiritual, and threatening.
Trees Are Watching is therefore most compelling when understood not simply as a horror film but as an environmental and cultural fable, one in which nature preserves what human beings would prefer to forget. Its supernatural dimension gives physical form to something much more disturbing: the possibility that destroying the natural world also means destroying part of our own memory, history, and humanity.
Rating: 3.8/5