It’s unclear if Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi was inspired by the seminal 1979 Stevie Wonder album, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, for her latest enigmatic feature, Silent Friend. But she not only could have used its title as an alternative to her own — she manages to capture the music’s trippy and soothing spirit, as well as its sense of experimentation, in a movie that gradually washes over you like a warm natural fragrance.
That doesn’t mean this two-and-a-half-hour arthouse triptych about man, nature, botany and brainwaves is easy to sit through, especially if you’re looking for a conventional story, or perhaps any story at all. But Enyedi is a master stylist who knows how to create a certain mood, mixing visual poetry with deadpan humor, and big ideas with quotidian foibles, in a film that explores our mysterious relationship with both the green world and one another.
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