| 1-2 Special | Release Date: May 8, 2026 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
15
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
May 15, 2026
As much as Enyedi enjoys positioning her camera among the branches, Silent Friend is ultimately too invested in the power of human faces and bodies to adopt a purely plant-centric perspective; what it achieves is more of a hybrid gaze, which encourages us to marvel at creation in all its forms.
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May 15, 2026
The fluid, idiosyncratic charm of Silent Friend — which never feels like two and a half hours — is in Enyedi’s heartfelt belief that curiosity is simply a garden that grows progress. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that this veteran dreamweaver’s key cast are entrancing, inviting specimens themselves, led by an inner glow of compassion in Leung that feels like its own natural energy source.
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RogerEbert.comMay 13, 2026
Trees, like people, are deeply connected to the world around them. We, like they, pick up on signals, receive and interpret them, and respond in kind. “Silent Friend” offers the gentlest of those signals to us, in the form of its own hypnotic, mesmeric filmmaking. Pick up on those signals, let them rattle around in your head, and you’ll be richly rewarded.
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IONCINEMA.comMay 8, 2026
With a vibrating audio palette and crisply edited finesse, Silent Friend becomes a sensuous immersive experience, flitting between observational instances of periods and characters, pollinating the audience with characteristics of its players with just enough information to keep desiring more.
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May 7, 2026
The film has a remarkable formal and narrative fluidity, not presenting its three stories as discrete chapters but cutting effortlessly from one to the other, with Ms. Enyedi sometimes dipping into a period for the length of only a shot or two before spinning off to a different storyline.
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May 6, 2026
Next Best PictureSep 13, 2025
The Film StageSep 13, 2025
Immersing yourself in the daze of Silent Friend is like accepting a joyous gift, even if you don’t ultimately believe that plants can or want to communicate with us. With her exquisite new work, Ildikó Enyedi has achieved the improbable goal of making non-human, humanistic cinema that is inclusive and reverent without falling into idolization (of plants) or condemnation (of humans).
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