This year’s Toronto International Film Festival is in full swing and has already seen a handful of thrilling debuts for horror fans. From Vintage Violence to The Spiral to River, audiences are getting their first looks at what will likely be some of the best genre titles of the coming year. Another highly anticipated title is Trees Are Watching, which stars Eva Green, and adding even more excitement to the project is that Martin Scorsese has just boarded the project as an executive producer.
Deadline has confirmed that Scorsese has joined the Bahman Ghobadi movie ahead of its premiere on Friday. The pair have more than a decade of history of collaborations, with Scorsese having presented Ghobadi’s Rhino Season back in 2012, resulting in Ghobadi spending time on the sets of Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street and The Irishman.
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.”
Ghobadi detailed how his personal experiences inspired the project, which is “shaped in part by the nightmares that have followed his 18 years of exile and his reflections on the connection between humanity and the natural world.”
Eva Green has become a favorite in the genre world, as she has a long history of a variety of macabre projects. While she starred in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows remake, she also starred in all three seasons of Penny Dreadful on Showtime. Genre-adjacent projects include Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For and 300: Rise of an Empire.
Stay tuned for details on the release of Trees Are Watching.
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