“Rigorously spiritual cinema that uses myth, history, and mannered framing to analyze the human soul.”

At first, Eugène Green’s The Tree of Knowledge having its world premiere at this year’s Fantastic Fest seems surprising. Green is a filmmaker more commonly associated with major European festivals, such as Locarno, San Sebastián, Berlin, or Venice.  These festivals align with his notoriety of being a master director and also are places in which his prior films have premiered.  Despite this, Fantastic Fest makes sense for his latest film. With The Tree of Knowledge, Green ventures further into fantasy and humor than in any of his previous films, while still carrying his unmistakable touch and style, a rigorously spiritual cinema that uses myth, history, and mannered framing to analyze the human soul.

The biblical Tree of Knowledge was both a curse and a gift for humanity: the source of sin, but also of free will, morality, and the ability to discern right from wrong. Green seizes upon this tension to construct a work that critiques societal structures while delving deep into human complexity. The result is a film both fantastical and deep, rooted in Portuguese myth and history, yet pointedly relevant to contemporary politics. It may be Green’s most humorous work, but it is also one of his most political.

The story follows Gaspard (played with magnetism and tenderness by Rui Pedro Silva), a young man fleeing the suburban Lisbon home of his nagging mother and abusive father. Freedom quickly becomes captivity when he is kidnapped by the Ogre (Diogo Dória) and his henchman Leitão (João Arrais). The Ogre, who has made deals with the devil, despises the tourists in Lisbon and survives by turning these tourists into animals, slaughtering them, and selling their flesh for profit. Gaspard, forced into the Ogre’s service, delivers two humans; and the Ogre transforms them into pigs and butchers them.

Green satirizes Lisbon’s transformation into a tourist city with both anger and irony. In one scene, a shopkeeper tells an American customer that she is worse than a thief. Later, in Rossio Square (the main square of Lisbon), the Ogre, alongside Gaspard and Leitão, turns an entire crowd of tourists into animals, an act so overwhelming that he cannot even process the resulting mass of creatures. Two escapees, a golden retriever (named Federico by Gaspard) and a donkey (named Helena), follow them home. The Ogre intends to kill the dog and donkey, but Gaspard, moved by empathy and newfound love for them, flees with the animals. Their journey leads them to the palace of Queen Maria I of Portugal, whose reign spanned the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Green’s cinema has always been profoundly spiritual. In La Sapienza spirituality was found in architecture, the geometry of buildings, and the way they frame human experience. In Atarrabi and Mikelats it was rooted in Basque myth and religion. The Tree of Knowledge extends this trajectory: it is set in contemporary Portugal, but its spirituality emerges through myth and history, through empathy across nationalities and species, and through the recognition of complexity in every living being. Once again, Green’s stylistic signature of centered frontal framing, direct gazes, precise shot/reverse-shots imbues his characters with deep and complex humanity. His compositions, startling in their precision and tremendous skill, remain among the most beautiful in contemporary cinema.

Though his signature form remains in The Tree of Knowledge, his thematic scope expands. Green has said the inspiration came from witnessing Lisbon’s transformation into a city overtaken by tourism and losing its identity, becoming exactly like other European cities which had succumbed to tourist culture, where humans acted like herds of cattle without preserving the culture and the rhythm of life of the cities.  Yet Green stated, when he stepped back and looked, the beauties of Lisbon were still present, and fragments of the city were still able to move him and retained their beauty. This duality of critique and affirmation runs throughout the film. Tourists are mocked, but Green does not reduce his critique to Americans alone. Italians, French, and others appear, making the commentary broader, a critique of the tourist system and of capitalism.  

The mythic flourishes expand Green’s moral questions. In one scene, Gaspard encounters a serpent-woman, half human, half snake, the embodiment of knowledge’s duality. She’s a symbol that evil is present, yes, but so is understanding. “Free me from the serpent,” Gaspard prays, not to be rid of knowledge but to deepen his understanding and to move beyond simple human binaries.  Likewise, Queen Maria I is rendered with contradiction. Born into privilege, cruel at times, but also deeply human, she embodies Green’s insistence that no figure, monarch, ogre, or animal, can be reduced to one thing. As Gaspard says of her, “She is cruel… but she is also many things at once.”

Politically, The Tree of Knowledge may be Green’s boldest film. He critiques not only the aristocracy but also capitalism itself.  In one of the funniest scenes, the Ogre consults a witch who has fully embraced capitalist logic. She charges fees for every piece of advice, except when a pro bono favor serves to strengthen her brand; as she says, it’s a form of advertisement. The satire is sharp, absurd, and incisive, and it becomes risible when the witch uses an electric motorcycle-like broom to travel.  Elsewhere, Green gestures more darkly. A newspaper flashes with an image equating Trump to Hitler, linking the supposed “republics” of the modern world, which are founded on legal equality and democracy, with the curtailment of rights under populist strongmen. Democracy itself becomes suspect, vulnerable to corruption by the mob – much like his critique of tourist culture. 

What emerges is a film of depth and range: mystical and humorous, mythic and political, and deeply local and resoundingly universal. Gaspard’s journey, from captivity to compassion and from despair to optimism, is not only a fairy tale but also a mirror for a world caught between cruelty and empathy, between ignorance and knowledge.

Placed alongside La Sapienza and Atarrabi and Mikelats, The Tree of Knowledge feels like a natural progression in Green’s body of work. Where La Sapienza found God in architecture, and Atarrabi and Mikelats in myth, The Tree of Knowledge locates spirituality in the messy contradictions of the modern world. It may be his most fantastical film, but it is also his most political, expanding his signature style into sharper critique while retaining the profound beauty and humanity that define his cinema.

That Green can hold all this together without losing his rigor is testament to why he remains one of the most singular filmmakers alive. The Tree of Knowledge may surprise by premiering at Fantastic Fest instead of Venice, but it deserves its place as one of the year’s most remarkable works. It is a film of great beauty and profound soul, and another essential chapter in one of contemporary cinema’s most spiritual and singular oeuvres.