Eva Green Horror Film Panned Over AI Imagery at TIFF — SkimNews
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- Bahman Ghobadi directed "Trees Are Watching," a horror film based on a Kurdish legend that people are reborn as trees and live second lives as furniture, starring Eva Green as Darya, an anthropologist returning to Mardin, Turkey.
- Neva Kuş plays Darya's Deaf, nonverbal daughter Connie, delivering what the review calls a standout performance opposite Green's committed lead turn and vivid flashback work by the film's child actresses.
- The film premiered in the Centerpiece section of the Toronto International Film Festival, with Martin Scorsese attached as an executive producer.
- The review praises Ghobadi's staging and cinematography but argues the film increasingly devolves into "generative digital regurgitations with repulsive textures," with establishing shots and connective tissue rendered via AI.
- The reviewer calls for a moratorium on major festivals programming AI-heavy films and demands ticket-buyer disclosure, citing labor concerns, copyright theft, and the technology's own heavy water consumption, which the piece flags as an ironic counterpoint to the film's environmental themes of felled trees.
- The central premise of a demonic chair becomes, in the reviewer's words, "an object of complete self-seriousness," with numerous over-explaining epilogues that the critic says rob the film of its mystery.
- Shots "barely fit together" in the film's later passages, the review states, with anything beyond close-ups of human faces described as "downright insulting to watch."
Why it matters: By pairing an A-list festival slot and a Scorsese producer credit with a near-total pans of the film's AI imagery, the review reignites the industry debate over whether major festivals should platform generative-AI work — a question with direct stakes for filmmakers, festival programmers, and audiences who currently have no disclosure of AI use at the ticket booth.
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