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[REVIEW] “The Silence Between Metaphors: Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend” by Anna Nguyen

Ildikó Enyedi (director), Silent Friend, 2026. 147 min.

In Marburg, Germany, a neurologist named Dr Tony Wong is giving a lecture on his research into the brain activity of pre-verbal babies to an engaged group of students. He is not a dry scientist delivering a cumbersome lecture; he charmingly tells his students that science is a series of metaphors, the implied contrast being that it is not simply a window onto objective reality.

Science communication and metaphor have become research interests in the humanities, as many scholars are interested in the limitations and possibilities of expert language within non-scientific communities. Unfortunately, Dr Wong’s admission seems lost, appearing too early in Silent Friend, a film directed by Ildikó Enyedi, to leave a lasting impression.

The assumed interaction between science and metaphor becomes the central preoccupation of the film’s three seemingly disparate narratives, told across three different epochs. A majestic and venerable gingko tree becomes the subject (or object, since trees do not speak so much as have language projected onto them) that links these multi-historical and multi-perspectival stories.

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Silent Friend begins with the ever-charismatic Tony Leung in Hong Kong, who soon finds himself displaced in an old German university town owing to the COVID lockdown. Unable to continue his research, he turns his attention to the gingko tree and redirects his scientific efforts towards her.

Isolated but connected via Zoom, Dr Wong develops a friendship with the French botanist Dr Alice Sauvage (Léa Seydoux), who becomes his adviser as he pursues his new project. Dr Wong applies his usual research apparatus of sensors, normally used on pre-verbal babies, to the gingko tree, and stands back to observe her wavelengths in the hope of detecting consciousness.

His narrative is interwoven with a black-and-white story following an aspiring botanist, Grete (Luna Wedler), in the early twentieth century. As the first woman admitted to the university, she predictably encounters sexism both inside and outside her laboratory. Grete finds solace in the university’s botanical garden, where the gingko tree stands. She later becomes a photographer and turns her newly acquired skills towards capturing her research subjects.

The third narrative focuses on a reserved post-war student named Hannes (Enzo Brumm). He is involved in protest culture and drawn to one of his housemates, Gundula, who is researching the interaction between plants and humans by means of her purple geranium.

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It is Hannes’s story that offers the most emotionally resonant narrative; his character is more fully developed than either Dr Wong or Grete. Unlike the more scientifically minded Gundula, Hannes enjoys reading in the botanical garden, often sitting against the trunk of the mighty gingko tree. In one scene that neatly exposes the binary between the sciences and the humanities, Hannes attempts to engage with Gundula’s research by recommending Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants. Gundula does not appreciate his poetic overture and reacts angrily, telling her housemate that he lacks the knowledge to fully understand her work. When she departs on a trip, she enlists Hannes to tend the geranium and the house garden. Hannes begins to perceive what Gundula has been hypothesising: that the plant can respond to his emotions, and he grows deeply attached to caring for it.

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Like the vignettes’ emphasis on the language of science, the cinematography is preoccupied with close-ups of the scientific imagination. There are abundant close-ups of botanical specimens, microscopic insects rendered large, and the wavelengths of the gingko tree’s activity. Yet what seems missing is the promise of intimacy one might expect from a silent friendship. The tree, though always looming, never truly forms connections with the human characters, nor accrues the social meaning that might bind all three stories together. The vignettes are united by science and the experience of science; the social is scientific and the scientific is social. It is unsurprising, then, that the most stilted dialogue occurs when Dr Wong and Dr Sauvage discuss their research interests.

What remains silent in the film is the universalised and flattened image of science it presents.

What remains silent in the film is the universalised and flattened image of science it presents. When we first encounter Dr Wong, he is in his natural habitat, a laboratory in Hong Kong. Is science understood and taught differently in Hong Kong than in Germany and the wider Western world? As the film moves to Germany, one is left to assume that science travels freely across borders, regions, and nations. Despite moving through temporal and historico-spatial spaces, science is treated as an unquestioned traveller.

Yet this depiction is unsettling. There are political gestures in the narrative that never quite materialise into a genuine complication of our relationship to the natural world, to science, or to language. Dr Wong is stranded in Germany because of the coronavirus, ignorantly labelled at the time as the “Chinese virus.” He relies on a voice translation app to render his Cantonese into German for the campus custodian, Anton, who is initially antagonistic towards both Wong and his research.

One is reminded of Dr Katherine McKittrick’s concept of curiosity and her sustained reading of the Caribbean scholar, poet, and novelist Sylvia Wynter. There is a tension between us as “‘science-y’ beings” and our wish to embrace the promise of science without reifying its racial and colonial underpinnings (McKittrick, p. 162). In McKittrick’s reading of Wynter’s reordering of science, “she conceptualises humans as simultaneously creative biological and biologically creative beings (rather than purely biological beings)” (p. 187). In Silent Friend, curiosity is depicted purely as scientific curiosity, a universalising force. The idea of poetics and metaphor is dismissed as quickly as it is introduced. In Aimé Césaire’s “Poetry and Knowledge,” the opening line is memorably provocative: “poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge” (xlii). Dr Wong conceives of phenomena as absolutely scientific and not socio-culturally situated: creative, perhaps, but not sociocultural.

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The film, perhaps unintentionally, achieves moments of institutional critique, however passive.

The film, perhaps unintentionally, achieves moments of institutional critique, however passive. As someone who also experienced the isolation of trying to exist within a German university during COVID-era social distancing, I recognised the distrust directed by German citizens towards non-German and non-white scholars. Anton refuses Dr Wong access to the laboratory without his presence, and in one telling scene photographs everything Dr Wong removes, to ensure the guest researcher returns all equipment. He continues his surveillance outdoors. Conspicuously absent are the German professors who fail to check on Dr Wong’s well-being; instead, a graduate student, hired before the shutdown, is asked to telephone him. When Jule sees that Dr Wong cannot grasp what she is reluctant to state plainly, they inform him that a complaint has been filed about his behaviour, which has been deemed disturbing. Dr Wong quickly surmises that the complainant is Anton, the only other person remaining on campus.

Science teaches us to notice patterns. As the three narratives unfold, it becomes clear that Anton, like the other characters, is enchanted by science, and it is science that ultimately improves his relationship with Dr Wong. In a peculiar scene near the film’s end, Dr Wong apologises to Anton, conceding that his scientific curiosity can indeed seem strange.

Science is also capable of producing beautiful images, as the film amply demonstrates. Yet it falters when it universalises clichés and fails to redirect our attention towards the political conditions that deny more than they recognise. In praising what poetry can do that science cannot, Césaire cautions that science apprehends the world in empirical and shallow terms. We do not need more scientific reproductions of the same stories.

Bibliography

▚ McKittrick, Katherine. Heartbreak and Other Geographies: Collected Writings of Katherine McKittrick. Edited by Brittany Meché and Camilla Hawthorne. University of Minnesota Press, 2026.
▚ Césaire, Aimé. “Poetry and Knowledge.” In Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946-1982, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, xlii-lvi. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1990.

^{How to cite: Nguyen, Anna. “The Silence Between Metaphors: Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 10 Jun 2026, chajournal.com/2026/06/10/silent-friend.}

Anna Nguyen left her PhD programme and reworked her dissertation into a work of creative non-fiction while studying for an MFA at Stonecoast, University of Southern Maine. Her work brings together literary analysis, science and technology studies, and social theory to examine institutions, language, expertise, citation practices, and food. She is currently undertaking a second MFA in poetry at New England College, where she also teaches first-year composition. She is the host of the podcast Critical Literary Consumption. [All contributions by Anna Nguyen.]