Light Needs review – a blooming lovely meditation on plants and their people

Houseplants appear to make conversation and yearn for lost friends in a witty yet luminous documentary from Jesse McLean

This experimental documentary by Jesse McLean about houseplants inspired me to go around my house and water all my vegetal housemates and treat the mealybug infections afflicting the jade plants in my office. Now I feel better for it in every way, while also basking in the afterglow of this luminous piece of film-making that is cinematic fertiliser for thought.

With a gentle touch that blends wonder and wit, prioritising none of the different voices and viewpoints we hear over any other (and that includes from plants themselves), McLean builds up an audiovisual collage of perspectives on plant-people relations. Some of the humans featured are merely silent subjects, often as still as the potted protagonists themselves. One woman is a bit woo-woo – but persuasively and charmingly so – about how one of her plants seemed to wither away with loneliness after being separated from her mother-in-law’s tongue plant it sat next to for years, only to become rejuvenated when they were reunited.