Martin Scorsese has come aboard Trees Are Watching, the psychological horror film starring Eva Green, as an executive producer. Deadline reported the news Thursday, one day before the film has its world premiere.
That premiere is today. Trees Are Watching screens at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 18 at 6 p.m. at TIFF Lightbox, written and directed by Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi. It is a MIJ Film production presented by Open the Door, produced by Seyfi Sahin, Ghobadi, Lydia Dean Pilcher and Golriz Ehtiati. Scorsese joins Lucas Akoskin and Bahoz Nasradin as executive producers. No distributor has been announced.
What Is Actually in the Film
Green plays Darya, a writer preoccupied with the spiritual resonance of trees, who returns to her hometown of Mardin with her deaf daughter. The family house she moves back into is ringed by mass deforestation, with one exception: a pair of trees planted for Spin and Nihal, twin sisters Darya knew as a child. Then the visitations start, and the thing doing the visiting has taken a deeply unpromising form. It is a chair, made from local timber.
A haunted chair is the kind of premise that either collapses or works enormously well, and TIFF’s own programme note suggests the latter. It promises surreal set pieces with “heightened phantasmagoric stylization and sometimes full-blown Grand Guignol spectacle,” singling out one sequence that “recalls the American Final Destination series.” Murat Yıldırım also stars, alongside Zeynep Çamcı, Neva Kuş and Lucas Akoskin, who is in front of the camera as well as executive producing.
Eva Green Keeps Coming Back
Green is one of the rare actors for whom the genre work is not a detour from the career but the best part of it. Three seasons as Vanessa Ives on Penny Dreadful remain the definitive version of that performance register, all Victorian composure with something enormous moving underneath it. Before that she was Angelique Bouchard in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows. More recently she carried Nocebo, Lorcan Finnegan’s 2022 folk horror about a fashion designer and the Filipino caregiver who arrives to look after her.
Where Bahman Ghobadi Comes From
Ghobadi is not a name that turns up often in horror coverage, and he should be. His debut, A Time for Drunken Horses, took the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 2000 and was the first Kurdish film produced in Iran. Turtles Can Fly followed in 2004, then Half Moon, then No One Knows About Persian Cats, which shared the Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 2009 for a story about young Iranian musicians dodging state censorship. He has been working in exile since.
“Toronto holds a singular place in my journey as a filmmaker,” Ghobadi said in the film’s festival press materials, describing a picture that came “in part, from the nightmares that have haunted my eighteen years of exile.” Green has called it a “modern ecological fable.” A film about a forest being cut down around a woman who cannot stop listening to trees reads differently with that behind it.
Why Scorsese’s Name Is on This One
An executive producer credit from Scorsese on a Kurdish-language horror film is less of a swerve than the headline makes it sound. Through The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project he has spent years restoring and circulating films from Iran, Turkey, Africa, Asia and Latin America, work that runs on exactly the kind of filmmaker Ghobadi is. And Scorsese has never been far from the register himself: Cape Fear and Shutter Island are both his, and iHorror looked at how the Apple TV+ Cape Fear series compares to the 1991 film earlier this year. He keeps an eye on what the genre is doing now, too: back in 2022 we covered his reaction to Ti West’s Pearl.
Nobody has said when the rest of us will get to see it. Festival premieres without a distributor attached can sit for a year or vanish into a streaming deal in a fortnight.
