Bahman Ghobadi's Trees Are Watching, a psychological horror film with Martin Scorsese as an executive producer, premiered in the Centrepiece section of the Toronto festival and drew some of TIFF 2026's harshest notices, largely over its generated imagery. Eva Green plays a mother who goes back to Mardin in Turkey with her Deaf daughter and is menaced by a carved chair.
Variety's critic complained that the AI is not limited to establishing shots: whole flashback sequences carrying the film's mythology are machine-made, and he found them ugly to watch. He went further and floated a ban on AI-heavy films at major festivals, plus some form of disclosure for ticket buyers.
World of Reel ties the reaction back to June, when Black Forest Labs showed Scorsese using its FLUX model to make storyboards and the Art Directors Guild accused him of abandoning the artists behind his career. A private call between his team and the guild's president followed, but later talks reportedly stalled.
The site points out that an executive producer credit exists to lend a film prestige, so the timing is poor for Scorsese. Other critics at the festival were not much kinder to it either, and the film now sits near the bottom of the festival's reviews, behind only Zack Snyder's The Last Photograph.
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