Louie Schwartzberg’s Fantastic Fungi asks the oldest scientific question and the oldest spiritual one at the same time

Beneath every forest floor, beneath every field and desert and riverbank, runs a network older than language — branching, sensing, connecting, dying, and regenerating without pause. Louie Schwartzberg’s documentary plants its camera down there and does not look away. What it finds is not merely a biological curiosity but a challenge to the organizing assumptions of modern civilization: that consciousness is human property, that intelligence requires a brain, that nature is a resource rather than a community.

The film’s central tension is not scientific but philosophical. Mycologist Paul Stamets carries it on his shoulders with remarkable unaffectedness. He is not a television personality or a charismatic ideologue but something rarer — a man whose decades of obsessive attention to a single kingdom of life have produced genuine astonishment that has never cooled. When he describes how psilocybin mushrooms cured his stutter as a young man, opening neurological pathways that allowed him to look another person in the eye and hold a conversation, the anecdote does more than charm. It makes the film’s larger argument concrete and personal: that fungi do not merely decompose the dead, but reorder the living. Stamets functions as the documentary’s moral and intellectual spine, but Schwartzberg wisely surrounds him with other voices — Suzanne Simard on how older trees feed younger ones through mycorrhizal networks, Michael Pollan on altered states, terminally ill patients who found peace through psilocybin-assisted therapy — so that no single charisma overwhelms what is ultimately a collective argument.

That argument, stated plainly, is this: the fungal kingdom may be the most sophisticated intelligence system on the planet, one that has been sustaining life on Earth for 3.5 billion years, that communicates, distributes resources, and adapts in ways that parallel the neural architecture of the human brain. The film pushes further, into contested but galvanizing territory — the stoned ape hypothesis, the possibility that psychedelic experience catalyzed the development of human language, the clinical evidence that psilocybin can rewire trauma responses and dissolve the existential terror of terminal diagnosis. These claims are presented with more evangelical zeal than scientific caution, and the film’s critics are not wrong to note the missionary quality of its second half. But the evangelism serves a purpose: Schwartzberg is not making a research paper. He is making a case for perception change, and he makes it with the tools of cinema, not the tools of peer review.

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The production is where the argument achieves its most convincing form. Schwartzberg, whose career as a cinematographer and time-lapse pioneer spans three decades, films fungi with the patience and reverence one brings to sacred objects. Mushrooms bloom and collapse across the screen with the speed of breath, their spores rising in clouds that suggest weather systems, their forms ranging from violent red claws to delicate lacework. The CGI sequences — depicting mycelial networks pulsing through soil, or rendering the psychedelic geometries of a psilocybin experience — integrate seamlessly with the natural footage, so that the line between the observed and the imagined begins to dissolve. This is precisely the perceptual dissolution Schwartzberg is after. Brie Larson’s narration, voiced as the perspective of the fungi themselves, is the film’s most divisive creative choice, but it commits fully to the film’s central provocation: that the organisms being described might have something to say.

Released in 2019 and subsequently streamed on Netflix, the film reached over 100 countries and earned a rare 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, landing at the center of a cultural moment in which psychedelic medicine was moving from counterculture to clinical mainstream. The timing was not coincidental. Schwartzberg had been working on the film for years, and its arrival coincided with a genuine shift in scientific and regulatory attention toward psilocybin therapy for depression, PTSD, and end-of-life anxiety. The documentary both reflected and accelerated that shift, pulling the subject out of the counterculture and into the vocabulary of ecology, neuroscience, and public health. A companion book, an educational curriculum, and a remastered anniversary edition followed — signs of a film that had found a function beyond entertainment.

What Fantastic Fungi ultimately demonstrates is that the most urgent questions about planetary survival may require not just new technologies but new frameworks for understanding what counts as intelligence, what counts as communication, and what counts as kin. Schwartzberg’s film does not resolve those questions. It dissolves the conditions that make them seem answerable by familiar means. To watch it is to be briefly returned to a state of not-knowing that precedes certainty — which is, perhaps, exactly where any genuine inquiry must begin.

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