Ecological allegory collides with witchy psychological horror in Trees Are Watching, and the first image has arrived ahead of the film’s TIFF 2026 debut.
Trees Are Watching makes its world premiere at the festival on September 18, and the fest teases one grand guignol horror movie from Iranian Kurdish auteur Bahman Ghobadi (Half Moon, Turtles Can Fly).
Eva Green (Penny Dreadful, Nocebo) stars as “Darya, a writer obsessed with the spiritual resonance of trees, returns to her hometown of Mardin with her deaf daughter and grows haunted by past memories of Spin and Nihal, twin sisters she knew as a child.
“Residing in their former family home — which is bordered by mass deforestation save for an ominous pair of trees planted for each sister — Darya’s unease is suddenly exacerbated by nightly visitations of a malignant entity that takes a seemingly benign form: a chair made from local timber. Soon ruminating on her checkered relationship with Spin and Nihal, the latter of whom claimed to be terrorized by a similarly fearsome fixture, specifically a maternal witch said to lurk in the home’s noisy toilet, Darya’s sanity begins to wane.”
Murat Yildirim also stars.
If that’s not appealing enough, the fest’s description of Ghobadi’s voyage into horror has our attention: “Across surreal set pieces that ebb with heightened phantasmagoric stylization and sometimes full-blown Grand Guignol spectacle — particularly in a thrilling sequence that recalls the American Final Destination series — Ghobadi conjures a unique flavour of terror, enriched with nuanced philosophy and a deeply personal dimension.”
Expect to hear more about Trees Are Watching when our TIFF coverage begins next month.