20 great movies from the past 20 years: The Mushroom Speaks
This week's rec is a fascinating documentary about our fungal friends, and the potential for an alliance between our species
I’m counting down to the 2025 best-of-the-year season by recommending 20 of my favorite movies from the past 20 years. Here are the previous entries, if you want to catch up:
2005: Caché
2006: Undisputed II: Last Man Standing
2007: Sunshine
2008: Speed Racer
2009: Vengeance
2010: Unstoppable
2011: The Three Musketeers
2012: Eega
2013: Rope A Dope
2014: Hill of Freedom
2015: SPL 2: A Time for Consequences
2016: Love & Friendship
2017: Mersal
2018: Infinite Football
2019: Dark Waters
2020: Riders of Justice
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Two weeks ago, I wrote about a movie that actually changed my life, and it’s time for another one – the documentary The Mushroom Speaks, by German artist Marion Neumann.
Before COVID-19 hit, my partner and I would go to the movies almost weekly. That came to a screeching halt in 2020 (for years, the last movie we saw in theaters was Birds of Prey), and in 2021 we were looking for a way to safely recreate the experience at home. Thankfully, we learned about the Indie Memphis Film Festival, which was offering remote options for its great slate of programming. The Mushroom Speaks was just one of many fascinating movies we watched during that week, and it sparked a love for our fungi friends that can now be seen in decorations, books, and meals throughout our home.
In The Mushroom Speaks, Neumann and a variety of professional and amateur fungi enthusiasts explore the fascinating abilities of mushrooms, and the potential for a fungal-human alliance to ensure the long-term survival of both of our species on this planet. Some of the people featured are explorers, some are scientists, some activists, and some are multidisciplinary.
I was hesitant going into the movie, because I knew it would directly talk about the climate crisis – a topic that absolutely terrified me at the time. But The Mushroom Speaks helped me face these fears and some of my latent doomerism by shining a focus on some of the people (and organisms) actively working to find novel solutions to the problems that plague our present and future. Did you know mycelium networks can remove chemicals from soil and water, and that fungi can compost complex biomass and help grow alternatives to plastic? That’s just scratching the surface – there’s so much we still don’t know about mushrooms, mycelial networks, and their incredible powers.
A key topic in the movie is the matsutake mushroom, a rare and expensive delicacy in Japanese cuisine. It’s a mushroom that specifically grows in forests cohabitated by humans and is nigh impossible to farm or grow in a lab , challenging the narrative that humans are solely a problem for this planet. The matsutake shows that we must live with the world around us and create a better relationship with the Earth we live on, and The Mushroom Speaks encourages us to think about our role as one part of nature.
On a much smaller level, the movie opened me up to eating mushrooms. For the first few decades of my life, I thought they were disgusting to look at, and surely would be disgusting to eat. In the years since watching The Mushroom Speaks, mushrooms have become a regular (and delicious) staple in our weekly menu – roasting maitake like pulled pork, pan-frying matsutake with a dash of lemon juice, cooking cremini with green beans (which I just made for my family’s Thanksgiving dinner). It’s rare when a movie gives you hope for the future and dozens of new recipes you want to try out, but, just like mushrooms, The Mushroom Speaks is a special treat.
The Mushroom Speaks is available to rent on dafilms.com.
