I Hear The Trees Whispering is a strange experience. It’s certainly the case that there are ideas in here, but whether these land is quite another matter. The film comes off as a bit of a cut ‘n’ shut, with a first two thirds or so which comes across as a standard, and dare we say, tedious ‘found footage’ style film, though it slowly becomes apparent that there is something else afoot. The final act of the film moves into something else entirely, which is clearly intended to shed new light on the first hour or so. And does it? It does not. You have to build a very secure foundation to be able to launch into something meta, which simply isn’t the case here.
We start with a long, radio-accompanied car ride through autumnal rural roads (the film was made in Hungary, but is seemingly intended to come across as North America, at least to judge by the American English radio channels which the driver skips through, as well as an early mention of ‘mountain lions’. But then there’s a …castle.) It takes a good few minutes, but then we’re out of the car – no dialogue just yet – and tramping, tramping, tramping towards a cabin in the woods, all the time with a man’s eye view, which we will depend on for most of the rest of the film. He, our guy, eventually finds a key and heads into the cabin; it’s decidedly rustic, but with a hi-tech headset left for him on the table, which he immediately uses to contact someone. Through this, as he chats to what is apparently his new boss via the headset, we find out his name is Will, and he’s taken a new job here as a ranger. It’s a job which has, apparently, been vacant for well over a year.
In rather stilted accents (this is clearly someone speaking in a second language) Will (Gábor Varga) discusses his reasons for taking this job in the middle of nowhere: along the way, he takes it upon himself to be fairly rude to his (American) boss, June, perhaps guessing that he’s unlikely to get sacked? So far, it looks like your standard found footage outing, with someone incomprehensibly filming their every waking move as they wander around the woods, but there are clues that something else is going on here – even if these clues render the entire exercise pretty problematic, i.e. as you persist in seeing this as video footage, because this is what it seems like, you have to wonder how dream sequences suddenly crop up – but crop up, they do. These seem to be flashbacks to a happier time, a standard kind of family life which, for reasons Will will eventually elaborate on, are now past tense. We also have heavy use of title cards, six in total, which is a lot given the film runs for just over an hour and a quarter: as is by now usually the case, these just pause the film and pre-empt a few lines of dialogue for us, without offering any real reason for doing it.
During one of his interminable sojourns outside the cabin one day, Will hears a chainsaw: he investigates, and finds both the chainsaw and an abandoned rucksack. Hmmm. A bit of a mystery, but not one which immediately changes the course of the film: we’re soon nonetheless back to walking, driving, walking. Things eventually take a turn, though, as we glean, through the headset conversation of course, that a bad guy is on the loose and may be in the vicinity. Here, the film could have segued quite easily into horror – the ground work seems to have been done for it – but this isn’t to be, at least, not as such. We’re instead encouraged to see this event as a factor in Will’s soul-searching, as he gradually talks through his trauma and, later, we are launched into something entirely different, which elects to override everything up until that point as an event contained within another, framing narrative.
Films, whatever their shooting style, wherever they end up going, have to build a solid framework – a plausible narrative, plausible characterisation and an engaging script. Without these things, the minutes bloat and meander. I Hear The Trees Whispering first of all misses the chance to create any engagement between characters by reducing them to voices only – we never see either June or Will, so we resort to simply listening to them talk, and this isn’t zingy, or otherwise effective enough to hold attention. Language and intonation is an issue. It also doesn’t help that these conversations quite clearly aren’t taking place at the same time, or on the outside chance that they are, it certainly doesn’t sound that way; there’s no real relationship here, accordingly. Even given the ‘twist’, it doesn’t make sense that Will is clearly wandering through the woods for much of the film – that is the premise, at least – but you cannot hear him breathing, getting out of breath, or reacting in any way to his environment. He continues speaking over a cut in one instance, too, which may be intended to disrupt our expectations – if I’m being charitable – but just seems clumsy. And, having failed to establish a relationship between Will and the audience, it suffers even more once the shift takes place, and the same audience are asked to cast doubt on the already doubtful, i.e. everything up until that hour mark. It’s a big ask.
In terms of plus points, there’s no question that this is a very attractive locale, and the autumnal woodland looks nice on screen at least. I can oh-so nearly see what director József Gallai is trying to do here, but there are too many issues and basic mistakes for the twist to work; by that point, patience had long been exhausted, which, at a running time of 77 minutes, is not a good thing. It feels for all the world like someone had a brief window of time to make a film and just decided to go for it, script and plot be damned: this is the result. It’s a shame, as I quite liked his earlier film A Guidebook to Killing Your Ex (albeit with some reservations) but it seems many of the same pitfalls I noted then, are still present now.