Iranian new wave mainstay Bahman Ghobadi tries his hand (and his prompts) at a midnight movie. 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.
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