Genre Drama

The Man with the Fir Tree (1995)

Item: The Man with the Fir Tree
Rating: 2.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★ — The Man with the Fir Tree (1995)

Right, so there's a man. He's been born with a spruce tree growing out of his shoulder. People want it removed. He's worried that either he or the tree will die if they go ahead with it. And that, more or less, is the ballpark we're playing in for the entirety of The Man with the Fir Tree, a short film from Turkmenistan that I tracked down as part of my A-Z World Movie Tour. It's not often you're watching something and genuinely cannot tell you what happened by the end. Not in a satisfying, enigmatic way. More in a "did I miss something or was that just… it?" kind of way.

I'll give it this: the central image is striking. A man fused with a tree. There's something there, something that could be genuinely haunting in the right hands. The body horror potential alone is enough to pull you in at first. Is it a metaphor for identity? For nature and humanity being inseparable? For the Turkmen relationship with the land? Maybe all of those things. The film clearly wants you to sit with the image and let it wash over you.

The trouble is the washing takes a very, very long time. This is one of those films that plants its flag firmly in the arthouse slow-cinema tradition and dares you to keep up. The comparison being made, apparently, is to Tarkovsky. And look, I have enormous respect for Tarkovsky. The man could make stillness feel electric. But slow-paced filmmaking only works when there's a current running underneath it, some tension or beauty or dread keeping you anchored. Here, I kept waiting for that current to switch on, and it never quite did. What you get instead is just… slow. Deliberately, resolutely, almost stubbornly slow.

The picture quality doesn't help matters. This is a low-resolution, low-quality print, and I watched it via a YouTube link because that's essentially the only way to see it. Now, I'm not going to penalise a 1995 film from Turkmenistan for not having a 4K restoration. That would be daft. But the murky visuals make it harder to lean into whatever atmosphere the film is reaching for. Tarkovsky's languor worked partly because his images were stunning. When the image itself is muddy, the slow pace stops feeling meditative and starts feeling like a slog.

There's a version of this story that could be genuinely unsettling, something in the spirit of the Eastern European folkloric horror I loved in Viy. That film understood how to let a strange premise breathe without losing its grip on you. The Man with the Fir Tree has the strange premise, but the grip never really comes. It's reaching for something transcendent and landing somewhere closer to baffling.

To be fair to the filmmakers, there's genuine ambition on display. This isn't a nothing film. Someone had a vision here, a real belief that this image of a man and his tree could carry a feature (or near enough). I just don't think the execution matches the intention. The pacing needed purpose. The resolution, such as it is, needed more clarity, or more deliberate obscurity, one or the other. What I got felt like neither.

I came away from it genuinely unsure what had happened. Not in that pleasurable, puzzle-box way where you want to go back and look for clues. More in the way where you stare at the ceiling afterwards and think, "Hm. Was that it?" Two stars feels right. There's something here, buried somewhere under the slow pace and the murk, but I couldn't quite reach it.

Two stars.

Rating: ★★ | Year: 1995 | Watched: 2025-09-14

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