The Creep­ing Garden

Con­ven­tion­al doc­u­men­taries tend to train their gaze on human life, but The Creep­ing Gar­den slides a small­er-scale sub­ject into the lime­light: slime mould. These seem­ing­ly oth­er­world­ly organ­isms evoke the alien amoe­ba of ​’50s hor­ror sta­ple The Blob, both in their appear­ance and their ten­den­cy to engulf and absorb food. They can move – albeit very slow­ly – and are even able to form effi­cient net­works, often likened to trans­port routes.

One ama­teur mycol­o­gist sug­gests in pass­ing that slime moulds may be extra-ter­res­tri­al in ori­gin, an asso­ci­a­tion that direc­tors Tim Grab­ham and Jasper Sharp keen­ly exploit. The open­ing scene of their film fea­tures a grainy NBC news­cast that reports the dis­cov­ery of mys­te­ri­ous, quiv­er­ing mass­es in Tex­an back­yards as if it were a close encounter. ​“Now we go from sci­ence to what sounds like sci­ence-fic­tion,” the anchor­man announces.

This alleged unearth­li­ness is com­ple­ment­ed by the film’s stylised sci-fi quirks, from a retro-futur­is­tic type­face to the delib­er­ate dis­tort­ing of video footage. At times, the genre con­ceits can jar com­i­cal­ly with the action onscreen – in one instance, a for­ager cheer­i­ly talks about observ­ing rot­ten veg­e­ta­tion while accom­pa­nied by the omi­nous elec­tron­ic strains of Jim O’Rourke’s score. For the most part, though, the approach works well.

Though the slime moulds are the unques­tion­able stars of the show, a ros­ter of inter­vie­wees is on hand to pro­vide sup­port­ing roles. The lat­ter half of the doc­u­men­tary focus­es on biotech experts, while the first seg­ment fore­grounds ama­teurs and artists who have played a low­er-key, yet no less vital, part in col­lect­ing, exam­in­ing and repur­pos­ing samples.

One of the indi­vid­u­als recalled is Per­cy Smith, a ​“cit­i­zen sci­en­tist” who cre­at­ed exper­i­men­tal nature films in the ear­ly 20^th cen­tu­ry. Smith’s love of time lapse tech­niques – or ​“time mag­ni­fi­ca­tion” – seems to be a pri­ma­ry influ­ence on the documentary’s visu­al­ly strik­ing series of micro­scop­ic shots. Despite the evi­dent­ly eso­teric sub­ject mat­ter, Grab­ham and Sharp pro­vide enough stim­uli to guide us from cyn­i­cism to curios­i­ty – per­haps even captivation.

The sight of slime moulds dri­ving robots, gen­er­at­ing music and re-enact­ing the divi­sion of Ger­many cer­tain­ly makes for nov­el view­ing. These blobs may not devour and dis­solve human prey but, it seems, they have plen­ty of oth­er talents.