Some directors pick a lane and stay in it their entire careers. Some genre-hop, exploring different styles and methods, courting different audiences. So it’s of note when a filmmaker who has always adhered to the former mode decides to try their hand at the latter. Few would ever have expected Bahman Ghobadi, the exiled Iranian filmmaker known for his humanitarian dramas about people living through conflict and oppression, to suddenly swerve into the realm of horror cinema. Yet swerve he has with Trees Are Watching, a paranormal chiller about a woman who returns to her hometown to confront dark secrets from her childhood. And what comes from a sudden swerve? A car crash.
Darya (Eva Green, inexplicably cast as a Kurdish woman) is a writer on a trip — the same trip she makes every year, to the town in southern Turkey where she grew up. Along with her young, deaf daughter and her dog, she’s ostensibly there to gather material for a book. But the trauma of the childhood she’s either forgotten or denied — it’s never entirely clear — resurfaces in these old haunts. Something terrible happened here before Darya’s departure for London, aged nine — something that has seemingly dwelt in the town all these years, yet is apparently only making itself known upon this particular visit.
Alas, logic is far from Ghobadi’s primary concern in Trees Are Watching, though before asking why logic should factor into a story about supernatural matters, consider the extent of the suspension of disbelief the movie demands. In one scene, a door that has been locked from the outside (with no lock) becomes locked from the inside (with no attempt to open it). In another, a math teacher is shown teaching a classroom of students something clearly not math. Later, a detective examines the severed hand of a corpse in the police station’s office, and a member of the public is present. These may seem like inconsequential blips of the rational, but collectively they testify to what a nonsensical movie Ghobadi’s latest is, made worse by the fact that its pervasively somber tone makes no acknowledgment of the nonsense.
Indeed, the director treats the messiness and the absurdity with resolute seriousness, and he almost manages to pull it off at one point. Extended flashbacks to Darya’s youth, albeit in which she plays only a minor part, dial up the absurdity with the curious introduction of a monster that resides in toilet cisterns. This bizarre turn in the needlessly overdeveloped backstory shouldn’t work, yet with powerful performances, elegant compositions, and sharp editing, Trees Are Watching briefly becomes quite a compelling watch. One could dismissively chalk this up to Ghobadi’s relative comfort working in Turkish (the present-day scenes are mostly in English), but there’s a carefulness and a purpose to the craft in these scenes that’s a cut (or two) above the rest of the movie.
Elsewhere, it’s all tired tropes, poorly conceived and clumsily executed. Ghobadi favors jump scares, stormy weather, overbearing music, dim nighttime cinematography, and the wretched old crutch of implying, quite unsubtly, that his protagonist is off her meds, in order to generate atmosphere. As for the haunting, the premise is that the spirits of the dead become trees, so there are images of bleeding wood and a possessed chair that feel straight out of a Quentin Dupieux movie. In this way, despite being such a humorless work, Trees Are Watching is frequently, and never intentionally, very funny.
By the time you’ve seen Green clattered on the forehead by the leg of a flying chair for the fourth or fifth time, you’d think Trees Are Watching is fully out of ideas (what few it had in the first place). But it keeps going, tying up loose ends to threads you’d long forgotten. Ghobadi’s approach is haphazard throughout, with a pace that’s alternately jolting and lumbering, the latter particularly so in its wearying parade of would-be final scenes. It’s rare to see such a talented filmmaker so inept in execution, yet the cause of the catastrophe is clear. He has swerved far out of his lane, and in the process become horribly, horribly lost.
Published as part of TIFF 2026 — Dispatch 4.
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