It might be the best film of 2025 being launched in … 2026. Silent Friend, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was an instant favorite among critics and was lassoed by the 1-2 Special folks and now we have a firm release date (May 8th) and trailer debut.
In our ★★★★ review, Nicholas Bell says “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. A structure similar to Bertrand Bonello’s 2023 masterpiece The Beast (also starring Seydoux) utilizes a same sense of how humankind’s essence travels beyond the mortality of the flesh. Whereas Bonello suggests a formidable despair regarding our eradication through technology, Enyedi leaves us merely at a moment in our modern progress to suggest we’re still as yet moving slowly toward a more sublime and serene existence.”
Clearly Ildikó Enyedi‘s gifted us with what might be among our best efforts ever. Here is the trailer and Film at Lincoln Center description:
Ildikó Enyedi, whose On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear at the 2017 Berlinale and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film, returns with a century-spanning triptych that moves from 1908 to the early months of the pandemic, unfolding around an ancient ginkgo in the botanical garden of Marburg University, the fixed witness to a century’s worth of passing faces. From a young woman forcing her way into the male-dominated scientific establishment at the dawn of the 20th century (played by Luna Wedler, winner of the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actress at the 2025 Venice Film Festival), to idealistic lovers in the politically turbulent 1970s, Enyedi considers how consciousness itself is historically situated, mapping the incremental rewiring of how people think and connect over time. Tony Leung anchors the 2020 chapter with a characteristically subtle, deeply felt performance as a visiting neuroscientist stranded on campus during lockdown, whose attempt to measure the tree’s electromagnetic signals—guided remotely by a French plant biologist, played by Léa Seydoux—gradually opens into a meditation on perception itself. Shifting between silvered monochrome 35mm, warm 16mm, and digital macro-photography, Silent Friend attends to the rhythms of time in all its forms, where the tremor of a leaf in late afternoon carries the same gravity as a held glance across a room. A 1-2 Special release.
