The Silent Friend represents Hong Kong legend Tony Leung Chiu‑wai’s first European film. Hungarian‑born, Germany‑based director Ildikó Enyedi crafted the role of Tony with Leung specifically in mind. Enyedi has said the title — The Silent Friend — points to the ginkgo tree at the film’s center while also underscoring Leung’s quiet, commanding presence.
The film interweaves the stories of three protagonists living in different eras: Tony (Tony Leung Chiu‑wai), Grete (Luna Wedler) and Hannes (Enzo Broom). Tony’s narrative opens in 2020. He’s a solitary neuroscientist invited from Hong Kong to teach at a German university, where his research focuses on infant cognition — how babies perceive and respond differently from adults. When the COVID‑19 pandemic turns the campus into an empty shell, Tony, an outsider, is left isolated and his work stalls. After learning about plant‑communication researcher Alice (Léa Seydoux), he begins experiments to try to communicate with a venerable ginkgo on campus.
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>Grete’s story is set in 1908, where she becomes the first student admitted to the university purely on merit. In a male‑dominated early 20th‑century campus, she endures comments from professors and peers that would now be called sexual harassment. She struggles to belong and finds solace in the solitary ginkgo. At some point she takes up photography, and photographing the plants she studies reveals new, intimate perspectives on them.
The third narrative follows Hannes in 1972. A farm boy trying to adapt to university life, he feels out of step with politically and intellectually driven classmates. After he befriends an engaging student named Gundula, she asks him to care for a geranium while she travels. Gundula’s research looks at plant perception, and Hannes is startled to observe the geranium apparently responding to his behavior.
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>The Silent Friend frames three outsiders who, through deep relationships with plants, find a measure of healing. Because the characters occupy the same campus across distinct eras, Enyedi assigns each timeline its own visual language. Grete’s scenes are shot on 35mm black‑and‑white film, conveying the claustrophobic constraints of a society with no safe spaces. Hannes’s sequences use richly saturated 16mm stock to capture the disorientation of sudden freedom. Tony’s segments are rendered in a darker, sharper digital palette, underscoring his loneliness and quietude.
Binding these stories is an 1832 ginkgo tree that stands silently on campus, gradually seeping into the lives of the characters. The moments when each scientist connects with plant life are quietly affecting. Though the communication is invisible, the film makes tangible the comfort such exchanges offer its isolated protagonists, and the warmth that passes to the viewer. By the film’s end, the ginkgo’s shadow — which has long fallen over Tony — acquires a new intimacy. The final zoom‑out on the tree, now a mute but affectionate companion, lingers. Runtime: 147 minutes. Opens April 15.
