FANTASTIC FEST GETS A LITTLE MORE SURREAL WITH EUGÈNE GREEN’S BIBLICAL FABLE THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE -CLIP

Lisbon becomes a surreal battleground in Eugène Green’s The Tree of Knowledge, screening at Fantastic Fest.

If you’ve never been to Lisbon, The Tree of Knowledge might make you want to book a ticket—just not to any tours led by a man called the Ogre.

The new film from celebrated French filmmaker Eugène Green, The Tree of Knowledge, makes its way to Fantastic Fest this week, and it’s already one of the strangest entries in a lineup that’s never afraid to get weird. Set in tourist-filled Lisbon, Green’s latest feels like a spiritual fairy tale told through a slow surreal lens—part cautionary parable, part fever dream.

What’s It About?

Gaspard (played by Rui Pedro Silva) is a teenager from the suburbs who ends up in the hands of a man known only as The Ogre—a predator who’s made a pact with the Devil and now uses Gaspard to lure in unsuspecting tourists. Once they’ve been drawn in, he transforms them into animals… and kills them.

It sounds like a nightmare on paper, but in Green’s hands, it becomes something much stranger.

Gaspard eventually escapes, aided by a donkey and a dog—two animals he’s grown attached to. On the run, he discovers an enchanted manor where he meets the spirit of Queen D. Maria I of Portugal, who helps him understand the deeper forces at play. Meanwhile, the Ogre gives chase.

Spiritual Symbolism Meets Tour-Bus Satire

The film’s title pulls from the biblical “Tree of Knowledge,” but Green is less concerned with sin and more interested in awakening—specifically, a kind of internal renewal that comes when you break from the systems around you. In this case, it’s tourism, exploitation, spiritual numbness, and capitalism in disguise.

Yes, the tourists are annoying. Yes, the Ogre is a metaphor. But somehow it all works.

Take a look at the newly released clip below, and keep an eye on @HMUNCUT for more coverage of The Tree of Knowledge and other off-kilter gems playing Fantastic Fest 2025. We’ll be back with more reactions, interviews, and scene breakdowns from one of the festival’s most layered films.