The Tree Of Knowledge

A boy, a dog and a donkey walk into a bar...

They have a whole series of adventures, in fact. Somewhere along the way, there is probably a lesson to be learned. The boy, Gaspar (Rui Pedro Silva) initially lives an unremarkable life in an aspirational district of Lisbon, where he argues with his mother, who wants him to becomes an apprentice. He wants to stay in school. He may not be much good at most of his subjects, but he likes drawing. At night, when his father comes home drunk, he also fights with his mother, and things get thrown, so Gaspar leaves home. Like many a teenager with nowhere else to go, he sleeps in a park, and it’s from there that he’s kidnapped by a stranger called Leitão and delivered to the one they call the Ogre.

Gaspar is one of those folk tale heroes whose story is defined by luck. in this case, he has the good luck not to be eaten. Instead, the Ogre, arguing that it’s only reasonable that he should be doing some work in exchange for a space in the abandoned theatre he calls home, sends him out to flash his naïf smile like a young Luigi Mangione and lure unsuspecting tourists into dark alleys where they can be transformed into animals to be sold for slaughter. This transformative talent is something that the Ogre acquired in a deal with the Devil whom, he reckons, got the raw end of the deal, because his soul wasn’t worth much to begin with. It’s a living, but in due course the boy grows disillusioned, so when his animal friends are threatened, he steals away with them one night and attempts to make his way across the country, with the Ogre and Leitão in pursuit.

Despite the focus on travel, the film is shot almost entirely with static cameras. Speaking characters are positioned in centre frame, starkly lit. Some lines are delivered in a formal, declarative manner, and there is intermittent breaking of the fourth wall. Much of the film is presented as a comedy (it’s a pretty vicious satire if you get all the political references, but most English speakers won’t). Still, the delivery is so perfectly deadpan that those who fail to latch onto its various comedic hooks may find themselves entirely lost.

Silva has the kind of sweetness that makes it possible for him to tell the donkey he’d like to marry her – after they have shared a bedroom – and still come across as the most wholesome of people. Gaspar’s sweetness is such that he changes the hearts of many of the people he encounters, from ghosts to queens to serpent women. The latter, who misses being all serpent, discourses with him on the burden of consciousness, of empathy, and he finds that his greatest wish is for everyone to become more human.

It’s an endearing tale with sternly delivered morals. “Capitalism is never profitable in the long term,” one character warns. A notice at the end reassures us that no animal was changed into a tourist and no tourist was mistreated in the course of making the film (though many characters deliver savage anti-tourist rhetoric). Of course, Gaspar is something of a tourist himself, wandering around his homeland, but his manners are impeccable (even when he’s working for the bad guys) and he never leaves anywhere untidy.

Likely to divide audiences, leaving some in stitches and others completely nonplussed, The Tree Of Knowledge is handsomely shot, intelligent, self-conscious and unabashedly peculiar. It screened as part of Fantastic Fest 2025, and feels very much at home on the festival circuit. Whether or not it will make it any further is anybody’s guess.

Reviewed on: 21 Sep 2025