Slowly, the Needles Fall

Every December I find myself thinking about the trees. Not in a preachy way—just the basic strangeness of it: you cultivate something for years, cut it in its prime, drag it into a warm room, hang ornaments on it, and two weeks later you throw it on the curb like a broken umbrella. Repeat annually. Consider it festive.

A short film called O Human Being, made by the British studio Anomaly London, inverts the arrangement. In this version, trees are the dominant species and a man named Peter gets selected by a cheerful fir family to serve as their holiday centerpiece. They saw off his legs. They hang red ornaments from his torso. They jam a gold star on his head. He stands in the corner, perfectly still, radiating mute and total terror, while the cat regards him with the bored contempt cats reserve for furniture.

What makes it genuinely disturbing isn’t the gore—it’s the domesticity. The tree family is delighted. They’ve done nothing wrong by their own lights. Peter is simply a seasonal tradition. The film converts what must be the silent panic of a slowly desiccating fir into something you feel in your own chest, and it works precisely because you can identify with the victim. Resin becomes blood, trunk becomes legs, the whole cheerful ritual becomes a small atrocity. Your tree is already standing decorated in the corner. It’s already too late for both of you. All you can do now is run your fingers along its branches and whisper: it’ll be over soon.