Film
Fantastic Fungi
Fantastic Fungi is a lush, hypnotic nature documentary that treats mushrooms as psychedelic revelation and existential argument at once. Time-lapse photography turns spores into a swirling universe of colour while Paul Stamets, Michael Pollan and others argue that mycelium is nature's original internet. Equal parts science lecture and mysticism, it's a soothing, visually intoxicating watch for anyone willing to feel small and connected for eighty minutes.
If you liked this
How to Change Your Mind2022no page yet
Michael Pollan hosts himself, digging deeper into psilocybin, LSD and MDMA — the natural next step after Fungi's mushroom rhapsody, with more rigor, history and personal risk-taking.
But Four hour-long episodes ask for more patience than Fungi's breezy runtime, and it ranges across psychedelics generally rather than fungi specifically.
My Octopus Teacher2020
A free-diver's year-long friendship with a wild octopus delivers the same wonder at intelligence hiding in plain sight, just underwater instead of underground.
But It's a much smaller, quieter story — one man, one animal — with none of Fungi's cosmic scale or trippy visuals.

Kiss the Ground2020no page yet
Soil gets the miracle-of-life treatment here, with the same message that what's beneath our feet could save the planet, if only we'd let it.
But The activism is heavier-handed and the science shakier in places — closer to advocacy than nature poetry.
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
The Last of Us2023
Fantastic Fungi spends a memorable minute on Ophiocordyceps, the fungus that turns ants into puppets — this prestige drama takes that exact real biology and imagines it jumping to humans, turning wonder into horror.
Same fungal science, opposite mood — a devastating, beautifully acted survival drama that treats mycelium not as spiritual metaphor but as apocalypse engine.
But It's nine hours of zombie drama with real violence and grief, about as far from Fungi's gentle optimism as television gets.

More like this (8)
Our Planet2019
Attenborough-grade cinematography and planetary scale, for anyone who wants Fungi's everything-is-connected thesis writ across oceans, forests and ice caps instead of mycelium.
But It's a big, polished Netflix machine — gorgeous but conventional, missing Fungi's stoner-mystic charm.

The Biggest Little Farm2019no page yet
A couple rebuild a dead patch of California into a thriving ecosystem, finding the same magic in compost and decay that Fungi finds in spores.
But It's more personal farming diary than science documentary — charming, but light on biology.
Baraka1992
No narration, no argument, just relentless, transporting global imagery — the purest visual-meditation cousin to Fungi's trippier stretches, cranked up and left to breathe.
But There's no science, no Stamets, no thesis at all — just images. If you wanted the ideas rather than the vibe, skip it.

Chasing Coral2017
The same team's spirit as Fungi's underground network, but urgent and grief-stricken — a time-lapse record of dying reefs that makes ecological interconnection feel like an emergency.
But It's a much sadder watch, built to alarm rather than soothe — don't expect Fungi's gentle wonder.

DMT: The Spirit Molecule2010no page yet
Dives straight into the psychedelic science Fungi only flirts with in its final act, interviewing researchers and trippers about the so-called spirit molecule in the brain.
But Scrappier production and more speculative claims — this is fringe science, not polished streaming documentary.
Microcosmos1996
Macro photography turns insects into an alien civilisation under the grass — the same trick Fungi plays with spores, proof the ground never runs out of wonders.
But Older, wordless and slower — a patience test for anyone who came to Fungi for narration and ideas.

Fantasia1940
Decades before drone photography could capture spores blooming in slow motion, Disney animators tried to paint the same wonder — the Rite of Spring segment imagines the birth and evolution of life on Earth as pure abstract motion.
A hand-drawn, Stravinsky-scored vision of primordial life erupting from nothing, made by artists chasing the same cosmic awe Fungi captures with a microscope.
But The animation and science are of their 1940 moment — some of the evolutionary imagery is dated or simply wrong.

Enter the Void2010no page yet
Fungi's psilocybin sequences try to simulate a trip with swirling colour; Gaspar Noé's fiction film goes all the way, building an entire movie's camera language around a DMT-and-death hallucination.
If the mushroom-vision interludes were your favourite part, this delivers two unbroken hours of disorienting, first-person psychedelic camerawork unlike anything else in cinema.
But Aggressively bleak, sexually explicit and deliberately punishing — nothing like Fungi's warm register. Not for the faint-hearted.
People
Cast
Brie LarsonNarrator (voice)
Paul StametsSelf
Michael PollanSelf
Roland GriffithsSelf
Andrew WeilSelf- Mary P. CosmianoSelf
Directing
- Louie SchwartzbergDirector
Writing
- Mark MonroeWriter
Production
- Geralyn White DreyfousExecutive Producer
- Regina K. ScullyExecutive Producer
- Louie SchwartzbergProducer
- Lyn Davis LearProducer
Recommended by
Microcosmos, My Octopus Teacher, The Girl with All the Gifts, A Field in England, Mushi-Shi