Perhaps one day, the pen too may become a silent witness.

𝚃𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚜 𝙰𝚛𝚎 𝚆𝚊𝚝𝚌𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐

𝙳𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 𝙱𝚊𝚑𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙶𝚑𝚘𝚋𝚊𝚍𝚒

𝚃𝙸𝙵𝙵 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟼

Written by Narges Samadi

Where the Past Is Still Alive

The film does not begin with horror; it begins with beauty. It opens with trees, roads, mountains, and a landscape the camera observes with calm precision. The opening frames are so composed and visually serene that the film seems to be inviting us into a natural, almost safe world. Very quickly, however, that beauty begins to carry another meaning.

In Trees Are Watching, nature, the house, and objects are not merely backgrounds to the story; they become part of the protagonist’s perception. What we see is less a sign that objects are literally alive than an expression of a woman’s mind no longer able to keep the past in its proper place.

Darya, a writer who has come from London to Mardin with her hard-of-hearing, non-speaking daughter, enters a house that is more than a location. It is the site of a past that has never truly ended for her.

From the beginning, the film gives us signs of her psychological state: the medication, the gradual slips in perception, the instability of what she sees and hears. Darya’s psychosis, however, does not suddenly begin in this house. Its roots go back to childhood, to a collection of memories, shame, death, and guilt that have accumulated inside her for years.

In the past, a Kurdish family lived in this house: a mother and father trapped in a tense relationship, and two daughters growing up inside the constant conflict of adults. The mother wants to leave the house and this life behind and move to Istanbul, while the father insists on staying. The children are caught in a struggle they can't control.

The source of the film’s horror, before anything unknown or supernatural, lies here: in the family.

A house that should be the safest place in a child’s life becomes a place where the next argument is always expected. Fear exists in this domestic space long before it appears as an image or hallucination.

The younger daughter, Nahal, carries not only the anxiety of the household but also her own experience of shame and fear. From the bathroom incident and Darya mocking her as a child, to the psychological pressure inside the family and finally her mother’s punishment, everything gradually pushes her toward a point she can no longer endure.

Perhaps believing that forcing the child to stay and face her fear will help her overcome it, the mother ties her to a chair with a rope. But fear cannot be cured through force. Trying to free herself and escape, Nahal falls from the rooftop and dies. Her older sister, Spin, barely has time to process the loss before she sets herself on fire.

What we are witnessing, then, is not simply two separate deaths, but a chain of anxiety, shame, domestic violence, loss, and guilt.

Darya is not merely an outside witness to this chain. Her name apparently appears in the file concerning Spin’s self-immolation, and there are indications that she was near her when it happened. For years, Darya has lived not only with the memory of these two deaths, but with the possibility that she herself may have played a part in what happened to the girls.

And above all, there is the voice of their mother, remaining inside Darya’s mind and repeating the accusation: You were responsible for the deaths of both my daughters.

Perhaps this sentence is the psychological core of the entire film.

The mother also appears in Darya’s mind in the form of a chair. For me, the chair is not evidence that a spirit has literally entered an object; it is closer to guilt taking physical form. Darya’s mind can no longer contain the past merely as memory. Memory has to acquire a body, enter the room, sit in front of her, and speak.

Here, Ghobadi directly connects the film’s form to his character's psychology.

At first, past and present seem like two separate periods, but as the film progresses, the boundary between them becomes increasingly unstable. Two families, two groups of people, and two historical moments begin to overlap. The house no longer belongs to a single time.

This fragmentation of time is not there to make the narrative more complicated; it is the visual equivalent of Darya’s mind.

She no longer merely remembers the past; the past has entered her present.

Within this structure, Spin becomes especially important. In Darya’s mind, she is no longer simply someone who died years ago. Gradually, she becomes a guiding force, a presence that seems to direct decisions, violence, and murder.

The killing of Spin’s mother in the care facility, and later the murder of the mathematics teacher, can be understood through this logic. One by one, the people Darya connects to the suffering and deaths of the two girls are drawn into a structure of revenge.

But the crucial question is this: is Spin really directing anything?

Or has Darya created Spin in her mind to endure what she herself is doing, shifting responsibility onto another presence?

This is where the film’s horror becomes more serious for me.

The terror no longer comes from the possibility that a chair is literally alive or that trees truly retain memory. It comes from the possibility that the human mind can construct an entire world around something it cannot bear to accept — a world in which the dead speak, objects take on human presence, and the past returns to the present to carry out a sentence.

Even the axe gains meaning within this logic. Not only the blade, but its wooden handle can become, within Darya’s hallucinatory world, something more than a murder weapon: an object that carries the presence of the dead, the sound of a command, or a force of revenge. The film never states with certainty that such a presence truly exists, but it leaves open the possibility that Darya’s mind has given material form to the voice she hears.

The Kurdish legend of humans being reborn as trees also becomes important here. Ghobadi does not necessarily use it as a literal law governing the film's world; he incorporates it into the film’s visual language. Darya's mind brings human beings, trees, wood, and objects closer together.

Myth and poetry enter the character’s psyche, and cinema makes visible what is happening inside her mind.

This is also where the images of trees being cut down and burned take on another meaning. Something disappears, yet returns in another form. Not necessarily as a spirit or living substance, but as memory.

The past does not vanish; it changes form.

Sometimes into a drawing, sometimes a chair, sometimes a mental image, and sometimes a murder.

Nahal’s drawings are particularly important within this structure. The coloured pencils and images become the first place fear takes visual form before it becomes language.

The catastrophe is drawn before it can be spoken.

Ghobadi does not construct horror through simple shocks. He builds it gradually, layer by layer, through visual form. A coloured pencil, a child’s drawing, or a chair can become the starting point of terror because the human mind gives them meanings it can no longer control.

The cinematography plays an essential role throughout this process. The compositions are not merely beautiful; they generate meaning. The human figure is not always the image's center. At times, a tree, a window, a corridor, a wall, or a space carries more visual weight than the character.

This displacement of the center reflects Darya’s psychological condition. She can no longer clearly separate what exists outside her from what her mind is creating.

Nature and architecture are not simply locations in this film; they are part of perception itself.

The courtyard pool, the basement, the corridors, and the rooms all function by the same logic. When the basement doors open, it feels as though a crack in time has opened with them. Not because the past is literally emerging from below the house, but because entering these spaces destroys Darya’s ability to maintain a temporal distance between the present and what once happened there.

From this perspective, Trees Are Watching reminds me of The Others — not because of the story itself, but because of the coexistence of multiple temporal layers within a single space, and the instability of the boundary between reality and perception.

Eva Green’s performance becomes crucial precisely because of this instability. She does not turn fear into hysteria. The anxiety remains contained in her gaze, her pauses, her silences, and the subtle changes in her body. This restraint lets the viewer stay close to Darya while constantly doubting the reliability of what we see through her eyes.

The more Darya sees, the less certain we become about what has actually been seen.

And yet the most complex layer of the film, for me, is the investigator.

If almost all of the film’s strange presences can be explained through Darya’s psychosis and hallucinations, why does the investigator also seem to display signs of an unstable or unusual perception?

He recognizes Darya and, from the beginning, asks why she is staying in a house that has been empty for years. That sentence alone raises an important question: which layer of time and reality is Darya actually living in?

The investigator also remembers the deaths of the two sisters from childhood, and images of them at older ages remain on the wall of his office. This suggests that the past has not ended for him either.

Then the death of the teacher enters the story, along with the possibility that the investigator himself may have had some role in the way the evidence is shaped. At this point, the film allows us to question whether he is merely someone discovering the truth.

Is he simply collecting evidence, or is he also helping to construct the path that evidence takes?

And then the severed hand of the dead teacher appears on his desk.

For me, this is one of the film’s most important images because it seems that no one else sees it.

If that is the case, then the simple explanation that “Darya is hallucinating” is no longer enough.

Who is actually hallucinating?

Is the investigator caught in the same network of suffering and memory? Does he belong to another temporal layer? Is he carrying a wound from childhood that has also returned in the form of hallucination? Or is he himself part of the unstable world the film has created?

Even the scene with the axe heightens the ambiguity.

The important question is what the police officers and the surveillance cameras actually see. Do they see Darya fighting with a chair? Do they see only a woman striking space with an axe? Or is there something physically present that Darya’s mind transforms into another form?

If the investigator also sees things that no one else appears to see, then the boundary between individual hallucination and shared reality begins to collapse once again.

At the end, when the investigator also experiences the mother’s presence in the form of the chair, the question becomes even more complicated.

If this image does not belong only to Darya’s mind, then the film opens everything up again.

Perhaps this is Trees Are Watching’s final game with the idea of the witness.

Who sees?

Who remembers?

Who creates something that others can also see?

And who is simply living inside an old wound?

For me, the film's power lies in this instability. Ghobadi fractures time, space, identity, and character to the point that the viewer can no longer be certain which image belongs to reality, which to memory, and which to hallucination.

In the end, the film is not about objects that come alive.

It is about a mind that cannot bury its dead.

About a past that does not disappear; it only changes form.

And about one of those films that truly begins in your mind after it ends.