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People get a bit funny in the woods sometimes
The closing credits of Ben Wheatley's In the Earth (2021) flicked across the screen like slides from a nonexistent catalogue of Ghost Box and I wished Mark Fisher had been alive to review this film. Its exhausted future has branched into our present; its invocation of the parapsychological '70's is as skeptical and self-undermining as it is psychedelically energized; it is as much a meditation on the forms of folk horror as the thing itself. It was my first film of the pandemic era and it's set the bar high.
Two years ago, the film's setting of a global pandemic would have made it science fiction; now it merely looks like an AU, since the unspecified contagion for which Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) is disinfectant-sprayed and screened by samples of blood and urine isn't COVID-19, though it has produced a similar climate of isolation and anxiety. Conversation alludes to third waves, months of lockdown, the devastation of nearby Bristol. The woodlands first seen by the slow zoom through the eye of a menhir—an image that will recur as ambiguously and implacably as a black sun or a fossilized scream—have been requisitioned as a research site by the government for the duration of the "crisis," the former holiday rental of the lodge at its green-yawning edge transformed into a quarantine station that retains its decor of antlered chandeliers and ye olde woodcuts among the plastic sheeting and folding chairs. To rendezvous with a colleague in mycorrhizal studies, Martin will have to hike two days into a forest of special scientific interest where the soil is unusually fertile and mobile coverage is nil, a journey we might entrust without a second thought to the professional woodcraft of Alma (Ellora Torchia), the park ranger who's been delegated as his guide, but side-eye rather more when assigned to a gangling perma-grad student whose diffidence borders on the pathological. Nonetheless, the worst thing that happens on their first day out is that Martin is absolute rubbish at pitching a tent. Alma smokes by their fire at night; the film never misses a chance to light her beautifully sculpted skin like bronze. The discovery of an empty tent with a child's picture book tangled in a skein of blankets and cookware is sad, but not mysterious: "I saw a camp like this once. A family. They came out into the woods, got sick, and . . ." And then on the second night they are set upon as they sleep, thrashed, robbed, left to traverse the hazards of the prickly, thin-beaten track barefoot as penitents, and their well-timed rescue by the gentlemanly, if slightly grandstanding squatter who introduces himself as Zach (Reece Shearsmith) soon proves no more reliable than the refuge they find with Dr. Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires) in her fairy ring of strobe lights and synthesizers, probing the earth for something more elusive and numinous than crop productivity. "This isn't chance," she insists of their arrival as flares hiss like dragon-stars in the night beyond her perimeter and a fog-wall of spores encircles the field where the menhir stands sun-pierced, the forest looking through itself. "It isn't. And you can't fight it." It is a measure of the film's maturity that the question isn't whether she's right, but if so, so what?
At the lacuna of its heart, In the Earth is a story about the stories that people tell themselves to make sense of the world even when there's no sense to be made. Revealed in their true ornament, Zach and Olivia stand as cautionary, baneful consorts, the right and left hand of irrationality, his self-reifying rituals of murder and photography and her debriding algorithms of sound and light warping around their ostensible opposition to meet at the point of being epically wrong. "It's pattern-making," she criticizes his invented religion, not recognizing that she is describing her own fringe systematism in the same breath. "It's a psychological problem with humans. They want to make stories out of everything." It's not that there's nothing to the local legend of Parnag Fegg, the ancient woodland something who shifts shape in our understanding almost as many times as the film itself. It's that as Alma casually and correctly observed at the very outset of the action, "I think the forest is like something that you can sense, so it makes sense that they should give that feeling a face." It is not just clever of the film, but central to its argument that it remembers that every story has more than one. Back at Gantalow Lodge, Martin first heard of Parnag Fegg in the feminine, the national-park equivalent of a public information film in the form of a densely unsettling woodcut and a year-old stack of children's crayon drawings: "It's something to tell the kids, stops them wandering off. They had a few go missing in the '70's, so this helps keep them a little more aware." To Zach who styles himself a sort of hermit-priest of the land, Parnag Fegg is naturally male, an accused necromancer and alchemist mysteriously absorbed into the standing stone and apotheosized into the forest itself: "Over the millennia, people reported sightings of him. A stranger who was said to help people who were lost." To Olivia scrabbling to regain her grant after her original line of research failed, "Parnag Fegg" is the crude pre-modern name for a scientifically achievable process designed to facilitate contact with the collective consciousness residing in the mycorrhizal networks that reach throughout the entire country like a subterranean mythago wood with the holed stone as their omphalos: "Of course, they wouldn't have got anywhere with torches and drums, but with modern equipment, maybe I could." Inevitably—folklorically—the one person who did not in any way go looking for this weirdness is the one who understands that whatever the phenomenon called by the name of Parnag Fegg may or may not be, it is not anything that fits the shapes of human imagination and certainly not these fiction-polished templates self-servingly seized on. It's not a god. It doesn't want worship. It's not a super-intelligence. It doesn't want to save the planet. If it is speaking, it is not speaking in a language we can conceive of understanding until we experience it and maybe not even then. "I don't think you are listening," Alma breaks in on Olivia's claim of establishing communication with the mycorrhizae, a small woman as sharp and slender as a flint leaf almost stuttering in frustration. "I don't think you've been listening . . . You keep talking about this thing as if it's human. It's not." Alone of all of them, the night of strobe-snaps and axe-swings and ear-wrenching industrial noise, she saw something in the woods.
I enjoy that at the same time as the film warns of the pitfalls of apophenia, it invites its audience to draw their own, potentially deceptive connections. Does the forest really draw a certain kind of traveler to itself, as suggested when the separate assertions of Zach and Olivia chime eerily with an offhand remark by one of the lodge's caretakers? Is Martin's resurgent case of ringworm a stubbornly mundane infection or the mycorrhizae's symbiotic brand? Is it meaningful that the picture book in the ruined camp shows broomstick-riding witches when the very old, nastily illustrated pages first describing Parnag Fegg are interpolated into a seventeenth-century Malleus Maleficarum? How do the missing children fit in? Surely we can't write off all those grotesque woodcuts of skeletons and dismemberment and weeping and fire and the white-eyed figure with cloaked, reaching hands and a crown of twigs because after all it works, the demented blend of electroacoustics and entheogens that releases the state of communion denoted in the book by the magician holding out their hand to the fog-bank from which emerges the cowled apparition of Parnag Fegg with the legend Spiritu venio silvarum. Or maybe it doesn't work, because the fungal cloud furls apocalyptically around the stone and its human company without the mandated sacrifice of Martin, the innocent who walked his throat trustingly up to the knife—consenting after the fashion of Sergeant Howie—and maybe it really was activated by Zach's corpse-homages and Olivia's audiovisual feedback and maybe that's just more story-making. Maybe no more ritual was ever required than the presence of a person like Alma, perceptive of the forest without preconceived notions of it. Her visions in the blowing drifts of spores are not hag-ridden, demonological, dark-folk: they are startlingly organic and beautiful, filled over and over again with images of the natural world flash-cut with human memories, jagged and overwhelming in their rush until suddenly she isn't screaming but looking in wonder through slow coils of drifting color at the kaleidoscopic churn of the forest and the body, the floating rods and smears and hyphae of the world through the menhir's eye. It is profoundly alien and I am not entirely sure what it communicates beyond the act of communication, any more than I am entirely sure how many voices we are meant to be hearing when Alma, the grey, dewy morning after, bends down to the stunned Martin in the quiet of birdsong and the black fall of her hair and says like her own echo, "Let me guide you out of the woods."
It is not frustrating to me that the film does not resolve its own questions. It doesn't feel like insincere withholding or a substitute for the writer-director-editor caring enough to know. It reminds me of the strange stories of Robert Aickman, where explanations would never actually help; it insists on the unknowability of the truly alien, the acknowledgement of the uncontrollable, cosmic horror in a handful of moss. Actually, outside of the gore, I am not sure that I found In the Earth upsetting except in the ways that it upsets me when people falsify the world. That said, persons with sensitivities to strobe lights and either foot or eye trauma should perhaps not watch this movie and persons who are not me may still want to watch it with the option of earplugs. The cinematography by Nick Gillespie, the score by Clint Mansell, and the sound design by Martin Pavey are all superbly immersive, simultaneously grounded and grainy and otherworldly and opulent, and passages of them are not intended to be any easier on the audience than on the characters. I still wish I had been able to see it in a theater, as I did its predecessor and companion in low-budget, high-concept old weirdness, A Field in England (2013). I am reliably informed that not all of Ben Wheatley's films contain hallucinogenic freakouts, I just happen to have caught the two that do. I hope most of them share the humor, which is here predominantly but not strictly black comedy, like the way that the progression of Martin's pained reaction shots pricelessly suggests the outcome of a walking tour by Kafka. I appreciate also, perhaps not incidentally to its moment, that a film so much about who is in tune with the land firmly foregrounds a non-white protagonist: it inherits obviously from The Stone Tape (1972) and The Legend of Hell House (1973), but the flickering flame of Penda's Fen (1974) is in there, too. It was shot in fifteen days in the summer of 2020 and closes with the poignant end title, "The producer would like to thank the cast and crew who stayed in the bubble and kept each other safe." And here we still are, or some of us are, and here are others not listening. This guidance brought to you by my chance backers at Patreon.
Two years ago, the film's setting of a global pandemic would have made it science fiction; now it merely looks like an AU, since the unspecified contagion for which Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) is disinfectant-sprayed and screened by samples of blood and urine isn't COVID-19, though it has produced a similar climate of isolation and anxiety. Conversation alludes to third waves, months of lockdown, the devastation of nearby Bristol. The woodlands first seen by the slow zoom through the eye of a menhir—an image that will recur as ambiguously and implacably as a black sun or a fossilized scream—have been requisitioned as a research site by the government for the duration of the "crisis," the former holiday rental of the lodge at its green-yawning edge transformed into a quarantine station that retains its decor of antlered chandeliers and ye olde woodcuts among the plastic sheeting and folding chairs. To rendezvous with a colleague in mycorrhizal studies, Martin will have to hike two days into a forest of special scientific interest where the soil is unusually fertile and mobile coverage is nil, a journey we might entrust without a second thought to the professional woodcraft of Alma (Ellora Torchia), the park ranger who's been delegated as his guide, but side-eye rather more when assigned to a gangling perma-grad student whose diffidence borders on the pathological. Nonetheless, the worst thing that happens on their first day out is that Martin is absolute rubbish at pitching a tent. Alma smokes by their fire at night; the film never misses a chance to light her beautifully sculpted skin like bronze. The discovery of an empty tent with a child's picture book tangled in a skein of blankets and cookware is sad, but not mysterious: "I saw a camp like this once. A family. They came out into the woods, got sick, and . . ." And then on the second night they are set upon as they sleep, thrashed, robbed, left to traverse the hazards of the prickly, thin-beaten track barefoot as penitents, and their well-timed rescue by the gentlemanly, if slightly grandstanding squatter who introduces himself as Zach (Reece Shearsmith) soon proves no more reliable than the refuge they find with Dr. Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires) in her fairy ring of strobe lights and synthesizers, probing the earth for something more elusive and numinous than crop productivity. "This isn't chance," she insists of their arrival as flares hiss like dragon-stars in the night beyond her perimeter and a fog-wall of spores encircles the field where the menhir stands sun-pierced, the forest looking through itself. "It isn't. And you can't fight it." It is a measure of the film's maturity that the question isn't whether she's right, but if so, so what?
At the lacuna of its heart, In the Earth is a story about the stories that people tell themselves to make sense of the world even when there's no sense to be made. Revealed in their true ornament, Zach and Olivia stand as cautionary, baneful consorts, the right and left hand of irrationality, his self-reifying rituals of murder and photography and her debriding algorithms of sound and light warping around their ostensible opposition to meet at the point of being epically wrong. "It's pattern-making," she criticizes his invented religion, not recognizing that she is describing her own fringe systematism in the same breath. "It's a psychological problem with humans. They want to make stories out of everything." It's not that there's nothing to the local legend of Parnag Fegg, the ancient woodland something who shifts shape in our understanding almost as many times as the film itself. It's that as Alma casually and correctly observed at the very outset of the action, "I think the forest is like something that you can sense, so it makes sense that they should give that feeling a face." It is not just clever of the film, but central to its argument that it remembers that every story has more than one. Back at Gantalow Lodge, Martin first heard of Parnag Fegg in the feminine, the national-park equivalent of a public information film in the form of a densely unsettling woodcut and a year-old stack of children's crayon drawings: "It's something to tell the kids, stops them wandering off. They had a few go missing in the '70's, so this helps keep them a little more aware." To Zach who styles himself a sort of hermit-priest of the land, Parnag Fegg is naturally male, an accused necromancer and alchemist mysteriously absorbed into the standing stone and apotheosized into the forest itself: "Over the millennia, people reported sightings of him. A stranger who was said to help people who were lost." To Olivia scrabbling to regain her grant after her original line of research failed, "Parnag Fegg" is the crude pre-modern name for a scientifically achievable process designed to facilitate contact with the collective consciousness residing in the mycorrhizal networks that reach throughout the entire country like a subterranean mythago wood with the holed stone as their omphalos: "Of course, they wouldn't have got anywhere with torches and drums, but with modern equipment, maybe I could." Inevitably—folklorically—the one person who did not in any way go looking for this weirdness is the one who understands that whatever the phenomenon called by the name of Parnag Fegg may or may not be, it is not anything that fits the shapes of human imagination and certainly not these fiction-polished templates self-servingly seized on. It's not a god. It doesn't want worship. It's not a super-intelligence. It doesn't want to save the planet. If it is speaking, it is not speaking in a language we can conceive of understanding until we experience it and maybe not even then. "I don't think you are listening," Alma breaks in on Olivia's claim of establishing communication with the mycorrhizae, a small woman as sharp and slender as a flint leaf almost stuttering in frustration. "I don't think you've been listening . . . You keep talking about this thing as if it's human. It's not." Alone of all of them, the night of strobe-snaps and axe-swings and ear-wrenching industrial noise, she saw something in the woods.
I enjoy that at the same time as the film warns of the pitfalls of apophenia, it invites its audience to draw their own, potentially deceptive connections. Does the forest really draw a certain kind of traveler to itself, as suggested when the separate assertions of Zach and Olivia chime eerily with an offhand remark by one of the lodge's caretakers? Is Martin's resurgent case of ringworm a stubbornly mundane infection or the mycorrhizae's symbiotic brand? Is it meaningful that the picture book in the ruined camp shows broomstick-riding witches when the very old, nastily illustrated pages first describing Parnag Fegg are interpolated into a seventeenth-century Malleus Maleficarum? How do the missing children fit in? Surely we can't write off all those grotesque woodcuts of skeletons and dismemberment and weeping and fire and the white-eyed figure with cloaked, reaching hands and a crown of twigs because after all it works, the demented blend of electroacoustics and entheogens that releases the state of communion denoted in the book by the magician holding out their hand to the fog-bank from which emerges the cowled apparition of Parnag Fegg with the legend Spiritu venio silvarum. Or maybe it doesn't work, because the fungal cloud furls apocalyptically around the stone and its human company without the mandated sacrifice of Martin, the innocent who walked his throat trustingly up to the knife—consenting after the fashion of Sergeant Howie—and maybe it really was activated by Zach's corpse-homages and Olivia's audiovisual feedback and maybe that's just more story-making. Maybe no more ritual was ever required than the presence of a person like Alma, perceptive of the forest without preconceived notions of it. Her visions in the blowing drifts of spores are not hag-ridden, demonological, dark-folk: they are startlingly organic and beautiful, filled over and over again with images of the natural world flash-cut with human memories, jagged and overwhelming in their rush until suddenly she isn't screaming but looking in wonder through slow coils of drifting color at the kaleidoscopic churn of the forest and the body, the floating rods and smears and hyphae of the world through the menhir's eye. It is profoundly alien and I am not entirely sure what it communicates beyond the act of communication, any more than I am entirely sure how many voices we are meant to be hearing when Alma, the grey, dewy morning after, bends down to the stunned Martin in the quiet of birdsong and the black fall of her hair and says like her own echo, "Let me guide you out of the woods."
It is not frustrating to me that the film does not resolve its own questions. It doesn't feel like insincere withholding or a substitute for the writer-director-editor caring enough to know. It reminds me of the strange stories of Robert Aickman, where explanations would never actually help; it insists on the unknowability of the truly alien, the acknowledgement of the uncontrollable, cosmic horror in a handful of moss. Actually, outside of the gore, I am not sure that I found In the Earth upsetting except in the ways that it upsets me when people falsify the world. That said, persons with sensitivities to strobe lights and either foot or eye trauma should perhaps not watch this movie and persons who are not me may still want to watch it with the option of earplugs. The cinematography by Nick Gillespie, the score by Clint Mansell, and the sound design by Martin Pavey are all superbly immersive, simultaneously grounded and grainy and otherworldly and opulent, and passages of them are not intended to be any easier on the audience than on the characters. I still wish I had been able to see it in a theater, as I did its predecessor and companion in low-budget, high-concept old weirdness, A Field in England (2013). I am reliably informed that not all of Ben Wheatley's films contain hallucinogenic freakouts, I just happen to have caught the two that do. I hope most of them share the humor, which is here predominantly but not strictly black comedy, like the way that the progression of Martin's pained reaction shots pricelessly suggests the outcome of a walking tour by Kafka. I appreciate also, perhaps not incidentally to its moment, that a film so much about who is in tune with the land firmly foregrounds a non-white protagonist: it inherits obviously from The Stone Tape (1972) and The Legend of Hell House (1973), but the flickering flame of Penda's Fen (1974) is in there, too. It was shot in fifteen days in the summer of 2020 and closes with the poignant end title, "The producer would like to thank the cast and crew who stayed in the bubble and kept each other safe." And here we still are, or some of us are, and here are others not listening. This guidance brought to you by my chance backers at Patreon.
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Sincerely, an inveterate patterner (I will take the word from LeGuin, as one should so many things, because it implies the making and the recognition)
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I am honored to be the lens.
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I wish we could get back to that.
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It is not unlike! Although for what it's worth, the comparison occurred to me much longer after the fact than Kneale or Aickman or even Beagle's Tamsin (1999), so they must express their similar concerns with sufficient divergence—rhetorically, tonally, Wheatley feels much more like Peter Strickland than he does like Alex Garland, which I recognize does not disambiguate a lot unless I get around to reviewing one or more of the three films I have seen and loved by Strickland one of these days. I wrote a poem inspired by one of them, which has to count for something.
(As soon as it's established that the forest is officially an SSSI, I flashed on the line from Tamsin about how there's no such thing as a "Strangeness Preserve," which the forest completely, if accidentally, is.)
Sincerely, an inveterate patterner (I will take the word from LeGuin, as one should so many things, because it implies the making and the recognition)
It is a good word and you should apply it. One of the other things of which this film reminded me was "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" (1971).
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Thank you for reading!
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It would have failed its own meta-level if it had filled in all the blanks! It's not ambiguous to the point of incoherence; it is possible to follow the action of the film and even construe a good idea of some of the causes and I happen to agree with its stance on the dangers of human story-making, which can create art like we're watching and can also produce conspiracy theories and alternative facts and fake news. But it's not a puzzle, as we are so often pop-culturally trained to approach narratives now; it's more like an experiment or an invitation. It leaves a lot open and it should. The eye of the menhir. Nothing fills that space but its own mystery.
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I really liked it! I may have to go back and fill in the rest of Wheatley's filmography. I kept meaning to see his High-Rise (2015) for Ballard and Tom Hiddleston.
Do you think it's in conversation with Annihilation?
It's harder for me to tell, because I didn't feel that I was seeing deliberate allusions as with the films from the '70's, but they could absolutely be watched together. There are ways in which In the Earth actually feels more like Annihilation the book than Annihilation the movie.
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They feature heavily in at least two major scenes in the third act, including part of the climax. I don't know if the frequency makes a difference to you: they are often a kind of irregular magnesium snap as opposed to a constant stop-motion flicker, but there are a lot of individual flashes.
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I did keep making comparisons with Annihilation, and one thing that struck me was how much this one was about personalities. The four characters are like tarot cards. Martin: perpetually bewildered, timid, and in need of aid; Alma pragmatic, keen-witted, and clear eyed, and Zach and Olivia as opposite-direction mad and self-absorbed as you described. One thing I really liked was how Martin and Alma never, ever slide into Zach and Olivia's frenetic explanation-izing: when asked, Don't you see, they always very honestly say No, and not in a dogmatic way, but because really Zach and Olivia aren't making sense, or no sense that extends beyond their own minds. Alma and Martin point out the contradictions in the other two's behavior, but the other two are past caring about such things.
It's interesting that the older two fall into a culturally derived story of what they're dealing with, whereas Alma's able to approach her experiences completely freshly. I loved the line you quoted: "I don't think you've been listening."
I found the visions lovely, but somehow rather two dimensional in comparison with the enveloping effects in Annihilation. The outsider/alien/other aspect felt more roundedly present for me in Annihilation; in this film I didn't have as much ability to reach beyond the storytelling, interpretation-offering humans to the other itself. I think that's part of why I ended up with the impression that this was more about humans and how they react to something mind-breaking. Here is a great lacuna: watch the humans embroider around its edges.
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Cool!
The four characters are like tarot cards.
I like that way of looking at them and not just because after a certain point—it may actually have been the third time someone did something awful to his foot and he just sort of nervously, politely demurred—I couldn't stop thinking of Martin as the Fool of this movie's pack. The division of the four characters, especially the two who careen off into their ideological polarities and the one who finally saves the other and understands, was one of the elements that felt directly indebted to The Legend of Hell House. (It is by me a feature rather than a bug. I owe that movie my own debts.)
One thing I really liked was how Martin and Alma never, ever slide into Zach and Olivia's frenetic explanation-izing: when asked, Don't you see, they always very honestly say No, and not in a dogmatic way, but because really Zach and Olivia aren't making sense, or no sense that extends beyond their own minds.
Yes! And the same each time one of them is appealed to explain to the other. Aside from any concept of solidarity, there's just nothing there to explain.
It's interesting that the older two fall into a culturally derived story of what they're dealing with, whereas Alma's able to approach her experiences completely freshly.
That's true, and it feels telling about the kind of people they are. I appreciated how the cross-linking of characters avoided any straw men about scientists vs. nature people. The contrast of Zach with Alma especially underscores how much he's just climbed up inside his own head instead of "returning to the green"—he's made the forest so much of a part of his mythos, he's incapable of taking it on its own terms. To be fair to all parties, one of my early reactions to Olivia was jeez, lady, no wonder you lost your grant. Martin in a wilderness environment is a danger to himself and others, but I would trust him not to create a micro-cult.
Here is a great lacuna: watch the humans embroider around its edges.
I agree it's much more about the act of interpretation than the nature of the other, although I wasn't disappointed by the moment of contact because it was so satisfyingly alien to me. At the risk of story-making, it seemed legible that it's not malevolent: the horror of the folklore looks like a reaction to the difficulty of its mode of communication rather than any intent to harm or disorient or frighten on its side: even without the gulf in perceptions and processes, spore-mediated kything, at least in the initial stages, looks rough. Alma doesn't have a transcendent experience trying to get out through the spore-wall, she has a terrifying one. The second time at the stone, she still has to survive the shock of contact long enough for it to resolve into anything more than a flood of alien information mixed up with her own mind. I suspect it's even possible to achieve communication and reject it because it doesn't match your pre-mapped story—I haven't been able to decide if I think something like that happened to Zach, although if Olivia is telling the truth (and she might not be), he had some kind of interaction which he proceeded to misinterpret terribly. But Alma experiences something weird and true and it looks directly correlated to her ability to accept the reality of the forest rather than the myth-making of it and it felt like respecting the alienness that I couldn't read the meeting of their minds, I could just observe it. I loved the doppelgänger-shot in the spore-wall because in hindsight it seems clear it wasn't some kind of hallucinatory dissociation, it was Alma seeing what the forest was seeing, which was herself. I couldn't tell if it was a story-making creature itself. It might not need to be. I was comfortable wondering rather than knowing for sure.
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I feel the same way about being comfortable not knowing. I thought the movie was successful in conveying that this communication and any meaning that's able to survive in a person after it is not something that can then be conveyed to others. You're not going to get an interpreter, except in the sense that Alma is interpreting when she says, "let me guide you out of the woods."
--yeah, my dissatisfaction, if it even rises to that level, has to do purely with the flatness of what we were shown when we were seeing what Alma was seeing/experiencing. The kaleidoscope patterns of the dandelion seeds and the mycelium designs threw me out of the story, a little, in spite of their beauty, because I felt too conscious of their being manipulated visual images. But I did still feel the overwhelming wash of it, the richness of it--so in that sense it was successful.
**What do you make of Olivia on the ground at the very end, beatific, saying "thank you"? I took that as her having experienced something of what Alma experienced--though I'm pretty pessimistically sure she's going to shove it into her old worldview.
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At least not the prevailing lore—if Zach wasn't making it up, if it wasn't human wishful thinking, the counter-legend of Parnag Fegg helping the lost in the forest could refer to previous successful encounters. I wasn't going to assume that Alma was the only one in history, either. But I agree with you that the other kind of story carried the day. It's rare enough to see other people as themselves without intervening screens of fiction, never mind sentient forests.
this communication and any meaning that's able to survive in a person after it
I just really like this way of phrasing it, as if communication itself is a symbiosis; it kind of is.
The kaleidoscope patterns of the dandelion seeds and the mycelium designs threw me out of the story, a little, in spite of their beauty, because I felt too conscious of their being manipulated visual images.
That's fair; mileage varies. I liked the ordinariness of the images because they felt to me like further evidence of the forest just foresting on.
I took that as her having experienced something of what Alma experienced--though I'm pretty pessimistically sure she's going to shove it into her old worldview.
That was my read, too. Sorry, Olivia.
PS
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I am glad I did not either oversell or underwarn for the gross parts!
(I have idiosyncratic reactions to gore in movies: I had to train myself to warn for physical and sexual violence in general because so often it would not register as an issue for me, but every now and then something about the emotion of it makes it almost unwatchable, like the one scene in Shaun of the Dead (2004) that upset me so much that I had to find a production photo of it to make myself feel better after the fact.)
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David's death. It's gruesome and it happens right in front of his friends' eyes and they can't save him and he doesn't get to say he's sorry. He's starting to. The zombies break through the window first. The last was maybe the worst part for me.