‘Trees Are Watching’ review: Eva Green is a writer haunted by her past in Bahman Ghobadi’s undercooked Turkish horror

Dir: Bahman Ghobadi. Turkey. 2026. 103mins

A piece of Kurdish folklore posits that the dead among us can be reincarnated as trees, and can continue an existence of sorts as objects subsequently constructed from the wood. It’s a creative manifestation of inherited trauma, and it supplies the narrative foundation for Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi’s first foray into genre, the psychological horror tale Trees Are Watching. Ghobadi demonstrates a solid understanding of horror convention but sadly is let down by a simultaneously overstuffed and undercooked script, and some questionable generative AI visuals that do little beyond refocusing attention on how quickly the film spirals into the ludicrous.

The set-up is a fragile construction at best

Ghobadi worked as an AD for Abbas Kiarostami before directing his own features including Cannes Fipresci prize- and Golden Camera-winning debut A Time For Drunken Horses (2000), Turtles Can Fly (2006) and No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009). His body of work is defined by its sensitive, insightful observations of Iranian oppression of Kurds, statelessness and human rights abuses in general – this should help generate attention for his latest work, as will the presence of Eva Green leading the cast and Martin Scorsese as executive producer. The messy storytelling and distracting AI may, however, make it a hard sell following its Toronto premiere and Tokyo competition berth.

Author Darya (Green) travels to her hometown of Mardin, in southeast Turkey near the Syrian border, to research her next novel. She hops in a rental car at the airport with her hard-of-hearing daughter Connie (Neva Kuş) and the family dog Booch, and heads to a house next door to where her childhood friends, sisters Spin (Ronia Rahmani) and Nihal (Sevin Ahmadpoor) used to live. Against the backdrop of the devastated, scorched landscape –  wildfires are raging nearby on top of rampant clearcutting – only two trees stand outside the house, a memorial to the girls that were abused by their unstable mother (Özlem Tas). The trees are also important to Darya’s work, as she believes they hold spiritual significance. 

Darya’s getaway goes off the rails almost immediately. The car breaks down on the dark road to the house; Booch takes an instant dislike to a dining chair; Connie insists she can hear a baby crying; and Darya starts recollecting her friendship with Spin and Nihal that ended in a tragedy she had a hand in causing. Her guilt is resurfacing – and it may be the reason she’s on a battery of unidentified meds.

These basic parts that lay the groundwork for Ghobadi’s vision of a psychological horror thriller, one with a laundry list of issues to tackle but none done particularly well. Humanity’s relationship with nature, inherited trauma, mental health and parental anxieties are a few of the subjects on Ghobadi’s mind, but there is not nearly enough time to properly explore them. Green does what she can with Darya’s increasingly unhinged behaviour, but her spiral out of control seems to come from nowhere; why she fears she’s repeating the neighbours’ grim history remains a mystery. The characters are sketches, and the younger actors struggle to convincingly evoke their fears. 

Genre generally relies on writing that forces us to ignore the inherent silliness baked into the forms; nothing goes faster than light, yet we accept warp speed. In Trees Are Watching, the set-up is a fragile construction at best, sloppy at worst. Green doesn’t speak Turkish, hand waved away as ‘moving away when she was very young.’ A toilet tank version of Ringu’s creepy ghost Sadako is never satisfyingly explained. A fight with a furious, growling chair inspires more giggles than terror or empathy.

Sound is, however, effectively used to convey the film’s environmental message, combinging Bamdad Afshar’s score with the sound of a chainsaw, shrieking feedback in Connie’s hearing aid and screaming. Ghobadi is also strong on horror language: dark roads, empty hallways, full moons, trees casting jagged shadows and so on. So it’s ironic that Trees Are Watching, which is partially about ecological devastation, includes large swathes of generative AI (a truck crash is particularly weak) –  the ultimate case of mixed messaging.