Eva Green Faces a Terrifying Presence in the Eerie TREES ARE WATCHING Trailer
A haunted chair, two ominous trees, buried childhood memories, and Eva Green slowly losing her grip on reality. That’s the creepy setup at the heart of Trees Are Watching, a new indie eco-horror film from Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi, and its first official trailer promises something wonderfully strange.
Mij Film has released the trailer ahead of the movie’s world premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival, where it will screen in the Centerpiece section this fall.
The footage leans into an unsettling, surreal atmosphere, with Green caught in a story where the natural world, childhood trauma, and something supernatural appear to be tangled together.
Green plays Darya, a novelist fascinated by the spiritual connection between people and trees. She returns to her hometown of Mardin with her deaf daughter while working on a new book, but the trip brings back disturbing memories of twin sisters Spin and Nihal, whom she knew as a child.
Darya stays in the twins’ former family home, an increasingly ominous place surrounded by mass deforestation. Almost everything has been cleared away except for two trees planted as memorials to the sisters. Then the chair shows up.
At night, Darya begins receiving visits from a malignant presence that takes the deceptively ordinary form of a wooden chair made from local timber.
As these encounters grow more frightening, she starts digging through her complicated history with Spin and Nihal. Nihal had her own terrifying childhood experiences involving a maternal witch she believed was hiding in a noisy toilet.
As Darya becomes consumed by those memories and the supernatural activity around her, her sanity starts slipping. It’s an unusual collection of horror ingredients, but that’s also what makes Trees are Watching look so intriguing.
Ghobadi is playing with environmental destruction, grief, memory, folklore, and psychological horror rather than delivering a straightforward haunted-house movie.
The description reads: "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."
Green is joined in the cast by Murat Yildirim, along with several child actors. The film is produced by Seyfi Sahin, Bahman Ghobadi, Lydia Dean Pilcher, and Golriz Ehtiati, with cinematography from Saba Mazloum and Touraj Aslani.
Green also feels perfectly suited for this kind of material. She has a natural talent for characters caught in dark, dreamlike situations, and Trees are Watching gives her plenty to work with as Darya is forced to confront a past that refuses to stay buried.
There’s no final theatrical or streaming release date yet, but Trees are Watching will make its world premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival this fall.
The trailer makes this look creepy, unusual, and just unpredictable enough to stand apart from the usual supernatural horror fare. And yes, apparently we can now add wooden chairs to the list of everyday objects horror movies have given us a reason to distrust.