DN:FLIM Fantastic Fungi
FANTASTIC FUNGI is an eye-opening delight, a provocative exploration of the remarkably extensive world of mushrooms and mycelium—the vegetative fibre network connected to a fungus—that manages to be an engaging personal profile, an enlightening pharmacology/biology treatise and an enthusiastic work of medical advocacy.
Director Louie Schwartzberg quickly introduces Paul Stamets, who looks pretty much exactly like you’d hope he would, being as he is one of the world’s best-known, largely-self-taught advocates for the underutilized medicinal benefits of mushrooms: Bearded, bespectacled, inspired and avuncular, he’s an immediately inviting guide. A shy stutterer in his youth, Stamets credits his tendency of looking at the ground then with helping to lead to his interest in mushrooms; that curiosity has turned him into a mushroom entrepreneur, author and TED Talker with a raft of incredible stories, including belief-beggaring ones about that stutter and about his mother. Meanwhile, as fun guy Stamets moves the doc along, no one less than intergalactic superhero Captain Marvel—Brie Larson—is doing narrator duty, taking on the voice of the universe’s mushrooms to drop more knowledge: Mushrooms form a mycelial network that connects everything; mushrooms are the means by which parent trees communicate with their offspring trees; mushrooms were here before anything: Mushrooms, “Fantastic Fungi” posits, are the ever-recurring beginning and end of life.
The doc is a visual feast; when the camera isn’t crunching through the old-growth Pacific Northwest with Stamets (and yes, Star Trek nerds, Anthony Rapp’s character in the 2017 spin-off series, “Discovery,” is named for him), it’s capturing magnificent, astonishing time-lapse images of decay, rebirth and growth. Eventually the threads of the film lead to what amounts to an extended endorsement of the potentially life-changing, transformative benefits of psilocybin mushrooms, including a nod to the evolutionary theory that it was early man’s ingesting of such magic mushrooms that led to the astonishingly rapid increase in brain size in the species. It’s certainly food for thought.
Opens on October 11