Trees Are Watching Has Eva Green, Martin Scorsese and a Haunted Wooden Chair

Bahman Ghobadi’s Trees Are Watching made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 18, arriving with Eva Green in the lead role and a fairly significant name newly attached behind the camera: Martin Scorsese, who joined the film as an executive producer shortly before its TIFF debut.

That combination alone is enough to make the movie worth watching. The actual premise is stranger.

Green plays Darya, a novelist who returns with her deaf daughter to her hometown of Mardin, where memories of two sisters from her childhood begin bleeding into increasingly supernatural experiences. TIFF describes the film as a mixture of psychological horror and ecological allegory, with Darya forced to reckon with past wrongdoing beneath the gaze of two trees — and, because horror occasionally gives us gifts, a malignant wooden chair.

There are haunted dolls. Haunted houses. Haunted VHS tapes. Haunted swimming pools if filmmakers are feeling particularly adventurous.

A haunted chair has ambition.

But the imagery appears to be doing more than supplying the movie with a creepy object for the trailer. Ghobadi has built the story around a return home, buried guilt and a landscape changed by deforestation. Published descriptions of the film connect Darya’s supernatural experiences directly to the loss of trees and to unresolved memories involving the twins Spin and Nihal.

That makes Trees Are Watching sound less like a conventional ghost story than a haunting where the place itself has kept the receipts.

Ghobadi is an especially interesting filmmaker to bring that idea to horror. The Iranian Kurdish director’s work has repeatedly dealt with displacement, borders and lives shaped by political violence. His 2000 film A Time for Drunken Horses and 2004’s Turtles Can Fly established him internationally long before Trees Are Watching, and the new film appears to fold something much more overtly supernatural into themes that have followed his work for decades.

Scorsese’s involvement also isn’t some completely random prestige attachment.

The two filmmakers have known one another for years. Scorsese presented Ghobadi’s Rhino Season when it premiered at TIFF in 2012, and Ghobadi later spent time on the sets of The Wolf of Wall Street and The Irishman. Deadline’s reporting on Scorsese joining Trees Are Watching described the relationship as one stretching back more than a decade.

So yes, “Martin Scorsese joins Eva Green horror movie” is the irresistible headline.

The more interesting story may be what sort of horror movie he has joined.

Green is almost absurdly well suited to material like this. Between Penny Dreadful, Dark Shadows and Nocebo, she has spent a good portion of her career playing characters who look as though they have already seen the terrible thing at the end of the hallway and simply haven’t decided whether to tell us about it yet.

Ghobadi seems to be using that quality differently. Darya isn’t merely entering somewhere haunted. The available synopsis suggests she has history with the haunting.

That distinction matters.

The best supernatural stories often become scarier the moment the ghost stops being an intruder. Sometimes the house isn’t haunted because something arrived there. Sometimes it is haunted because someone came back.

There is no broad theatrical release date to circle yet, and TIFF is still the beginning of the movie’s public life. What exists right now is a festival premiere, an intriguing trailer, Scorsese’s late addition as executive producer and one of the more unusual psychological-horror premises moving through the fall festival circuit.

Also: the chair.

I know I mentioned it already.

I am simply not willing to let the haunted chair escape proper scrutiny.