Universal Veil
2024
Directed by Michelle Bailey
Synopsis: Chemistry student Jay Thorn finds his life (and body) changing after being infected with an experimental fungal colony.
Average Score: 2.5 / 5 stars
Based on 2,318 reviews
Reviews
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kay_day – 5 stars – October 25, 2024
would you still love me if i were a mushroom
6,112 likes
wren_wright – 5 stars – October 26, 2024
Mandy Brink’s performance as Jay was one of the most compelling I’ve seen in years. They were incredibly believable in their portrayal of both the dread and longing of physical change. The tears scene really hit me at my core – something about Jay releasing tears in the same way a mushroom releases water – from every pore – was deeply affecting.
5,420 likes
billbillbill – 4 stars – October 30, 2024
This happened to my buddy Eric
5,199 likes
Jenz97 – 4 stars – October 23, 2024
Queer mushroom body horror, what’s not to like? Surprisingly good special effects for a mid-budget movie, especially the extra arm midway through. Docking a point for an abrupt ending that felt a little rushed. Still worth a watch overall, especially during spooky season! Three mutant thumbs up.
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madison_dell_dpu – 3 stars – October 23, 2025
How do you even rate something like this? The final product is great, but...I just don’t know how to feel.
qzrtip - 1 star – October 23, 2025
Abomination
david_danny – 1 star – October 23, 2025
Disgusting. Even when it came out I knew something was up. #FreeMandy
ppsam – 1 star – October 23, 2025
Need some eye bleach now that I know.
freemandy11 - 1 star – October 23, 2025
FREE MANDY
razorshroom9 – 3 stars – October 23, 2025
Docking a point from my old review, as I do support the #FreeMandy movement. Not to get too Machiavellian about it but we did get some killer effects from it.
lindalah72 replied: Shame on you! Effects or not, just think about Mandy. There’s no justifying what Michelle did to her.
Jenz97 replied: Mandy uses they/them pronouns, please respect that.
lindalah72 replied: Who knows if there’s any ‘Mandy’ left in there at all! It’s just a sick situation.
. . .
You’re a sick situation.
You grip the side of your laptop screen in one hand, trying to breathe deeply and slow your heart rate. Five seconds in. Hold for five seconds. Five seconds out.
Your other two hands approach the keyboard, but you check yourself. There’s no resolution, sanity, or grace to be gained by replying to Jenz97 or any of them. Besides, you’re under strict instructions not to engage in any way. Michelle and your lawyer have enough on their plates as it is.
Five seconds in. Hold for five seconds. Five seconds out. Breathing through the gills under your chin and jaws feels like sucking in air between your teeth, cooler and crisper than breathing through your nose or mouth. As you exhale, your gills release a thin cloud of spores that float down to the floor. You’re glad you’re shedding the spores now, alone in your apartment; you still don’t have much control over when it happens, and nothing sends an unintended message quite like emitting your reproductive cells directly into someone’s face. Michelle knows these spores are the asexual kind, but good luck explaining the difference to a date, job interviewer, or store clerk.
Not that you go on many dates these days anyway; while lockdown ended in 2020 for die-hard COVID deniers and in 2021 for casual COVID deniers, it never ended for you. Not really. Aside from the occasional cautious grocery run when Michelle isn’t available, you’ve stayed inside for the better part of six years. Fortunately your pale skin, pockmarked with white scales like an amanita muscaria, doesn’t require light anymore to produce Vitamin D.
You still don’t know where the fungus came from. One day in November 2019 you experienced the bizarre sensation of being born. You would realize much later that it was the moment the fungus integrated with your consciousness. There were no physical changes for several more weeks until your scales started popping up. Immediately, a whirlwind of mutation after mutation: your gills developed, your forearms gained a rough brown coating, and you found yourself having to dust wispy cobwebs of mycelium from your inner elbows, knees, and armpits. Each physical change would be presaged by a loose membrane – in mycological terms, a universal veil – developing to protect it as it grew.
Michelle, in her characteristically unhinged manner, quickly came up with her movie idea. Her final student film had done well at local festivals and you both could use the career boost after months of post-film school job hunting.
lindalah72 – 2.5 stars – October 23, 2024
I watched Universal Veil with my teenage daughter, who was desperate to see it opening night. I can’t say I understood much of what the film was trying to say, but my daughter seemed to connect with it. The film did not need so much violence and gore, in my opinion. I considered leaving the theater several times. Parents, Universal Veil is a hard R and absolutely not suitable for children.
inchworm_jim – 3 stars – October 23, 2024
There was something deeply unsettling about the various fungus effects. Every time it grew and pulsated it just looked...unnatural. Like stop motion with motion smoothing on. I wasn’t super there for the story, but it’s worth watching solely for the visuals. Not for the squeamish though.
tom_89 replied: they used ai
inchworm_jim replied: You keep commenting this but I really don’t think they did. It wasn’t smeary or glossy like AI slop, it truly moved in a way I’ve never seen anything move before. It was more like a time-lapse of fungus growing, but jittery, like if the speed was constantly being dialed up and down.
eric_dante replied: That’s a really accurate description! I’d been struggling to describe how it looks. I’d love to know how they did it.
Over the course of filming, what you thought was an infection had progressed enough to be concerning. Michelle was concerned and elated in equal measure; the hastily written script hadn’t included an extra arm, but Michelle was only too happy to rewrite to fit it in. The fungal arm would, of course, be one of several “special effects” lauded by critics, products of a breakout genre director punching above her weight.
Production finished just in time for the entire project to be shelved indefinitely in March 2020. Between your ongoing mutation, Michelle catching a bad case of COVID, and exhausting day jobs and day job hunts, Universal Veil would not be completed until 2024. In the meantime, your body and mind changed as you and the fungus synthesized. You practiced with your new arm until you could control it without the shuddering growth and contraction that gave it such an uncanny look onscreen. Alarmingly at first, it felt as though your motor skills improved not just through you learning to control the fungus, but the fungus learning to control you. Famously, a type of cordyceps fungus can take over certain ants’ brains and control them. You suppose your possessed brain wouldn’t know the difference if that were the case for you, but you feel strongly that it isn’t. You’re not infected; two organisms have simply become one.
john_melly – 2.5 stars – October 23, 2024
Universal Veil is competently filmed and well acted, but could have done more to distinguish itself from body horror classics of the past. Might as well have starred Jeff Goldblum and been called The Fly Agaric.
travis_macky: Passable pun, good sir, though you have mushroom for improvement!
logdog – 3.5 stars – October 23, 2024
Logdog’s Log: Saw a quirky, horrifying, but oddly endearing black comedy today. Michelle Bayle’s direction was uneven but charming, and Mandy Brink knocked it out of the park in the lead role. Looking forward to what this breakout duo has in store next. Logdog Out.
travis_macky replied: More like black mold comedy!
logdog replied: Ok
Unsurprisingly, getting Gregor Samsa’d in slow motion for five years was exhausting. Is exhausting – you have no idea when or if the metamorphosis will ever end. Sometimes you wish it could have happened all at once. Instead your body and personality changed too gradually to notice yourself but rapidly enough that others clocked it, even on Zoom calls. Your face stayed largely unchanged but you became softer-spoken and more reserved; it clearly made people uncomfortable. When the vaccinated masses emerged from their caves like nothing ever happened, you continued to ache with throbbing internal growths, ooze indigo “milk”, spin your mycelial webs, and scratch and pick at the itchy scales that covered your whole body. It was jarring how quickly most friends and family forgot about you once it became clear you could not socialize in the same way you once did. You were discarded like so many homebound, tossed out like a Shein top.
The irony is, fungus is in vogue! Everyone is writing about mushrooms, either as the next miracle food or as “nature’s social network” (that framing makes you want to retch) or as a model for surviving in the ruins of capitalist plunder. For your birthday Jesse, your lawyer, gifted you a copy of Orion magazine’s latest issue. “The Future is Fungi” declared the front cover below a colorful illustration of cute mushroom-headed people. He did his best, but it was less than comforting when you look more like a creature from some grimdark, nihilistic zombie-not-zombie video game. You slotted the magazine into your coffee table’s bottom shelf after he left.
Jesse has been friends with Michelle since college, and she has enlisted his help for any and all legal matters in her filmmaking career. He’s been a great help these last few years as one of the few people to have known the full extent of your situation. Now, of course, everyone knows. An online leak: it’s not clear whose fault it was, and you don’t particularly care. These things happen. You just wish it could have happened on your own terms.
eric_dante – 4 stars – October 23, 2024
Holy shit the arm effects! Haven’t seen anything that convincing since the Eraserhead baby.
tom_89 replied: they used ai
nick_trellin replied: @squawk is this true
squawk replied: With its skilled direction and stunning special effects, Michael Bay’s Universal Veil pushes the boundaries of filmmaking and proves that AI isn’t just a tool, it’s an art! ✨
yennefer2 replied: stfu clanker
tom_89 replied: :/
peepis replied: bot said michael bay lmao
Irrationally, you take some offense at tom_89’s insistence that your body onscreen was nothing but AI slop. This rando from last year couldn’t have fathomed the reality, of course, but the sentiment still stings. Surely you don’t appear with the Vaseline gloss and profane, slippery falsity of a generative AI image? (Though to be fair, for a wild week in February 2020 you did have too many fingers on one hand. “Just in time for Valentine’s Day,” Michelle had quipped, you remember with a chuckle. You wish you’d had the guts to sling a flirty remark back.)
James Nelson – 1 star – October 23, 2024
More like universal fail. Nothing but gender ideology bullcrap.
James Nelson – 1 star – October 23, 2025
“fReE mANdY!!!” lol. FAFO bitch deserved it
You click ‘Report’ on both of James Nelson’s reviews. No reason; no material reality will be affected. You just need that little dopamine hit.
razorshroom9 – 4 stars – October 23, 2024
Stunning visual effects. Practical FTW!
jimmy replied: Ikr! The amputation scene was something else. Can’t believe there were no cuts.
logdog replied: Well, there was one big cut…
jimmy replied: LOL
razorshroom9: 😂
Your one real regret from the shoot: the climactic amputation scene. Brutal, excruciating even to watch, but it was utterly painless for you in the moment. Your fungal tissue experiences no pain and grows back quickly, though not always in the same form. Some kind of surgery or amputation scene had been written into the script early on, but Michelle offered to keep it minimal or even fake it for your sake. Following a spontaneous self-destructive impulse coupled with resentment for the fungus upending your life, you insisted on filming a completely real amputation of your fungal arm. The moment the arm hit the studio floor you regretted it: by that point the synthesis was so far along that the fungus died instantly if it detached from your human body. You immediately wished it had been painful, as a penance for your moment of cruelty toward the fungus with whom physical and emotional boundaries had become contentious. Boundaries which would eventually blur and fade away without you even noticing.
Your synthesis, your singleness, is the critical point the #FreeMandy posters don’t understand. In their minds you have been captured, possessed by a sinister fungal force, trapped in your body with no control. You know that announcing you’re a single being, mutualistically existing with the fungus in a way nigh-indistinguishable from, say, the human gut biome, would likely only fan the flames online. Jesse’s tight communications restrictions fortunately prevent you from getting involved. Otherwise you’d post somewhere that the #FreeMandy spam from a thousand bored 12 year olds in Twitch chats looks more like brainwashing than anything you’ve ever said or done. From social media discourse down to computer code, everything online is expressed in binaries. There’s no virtual universal veil to shield those tender, growing parts of you.
You’re shaken out of your shroomscrolling by a knock at the door. You weren’t expecting anyone today. Slowly you get up and make your way over.
“Hello?”
“It’s Michelle!”
You compose yourself before opening the door. She’s wearing a cream-colored sweater and cute baggy black jeans. You, by contrast, are in gray sweatpants and a loose black tank top with a hole cut out to accommodate your fungal arm. Michelle smiles at you.
“Hi Mandy! Are you free?”
Of course you are.
“Well…” you drone in a mock-serious tone, as if deeply considering the question. You casually lean your fungal arm against the doorframe and cross your other two arms. “I can carve out some time from my busy schedule.”
Michelle rolls her eyes at your ridiculous little pose and laughs.
“Slot this into your schedule if you can.” She holds out an orange envelope, which you take. It has your name on the front. Inside is an invitation card decorated with stickers of jack-o-lanterns and fall leaves. “I’m having a little Halloween party at my place next week. I’d love it if you came!”
This makes you uneasy and Michelle clocks it instantly.
“I know it’s been a long time since you’ve been out,” she says. “But I figured this was the perfect opportunity.”
“What’s that mean?”
Now she looks anxious; you both know what she’s about to say.
“It means…” she hesitates. “Since you’re concerned about your appearance, we can tell people it’s your costume! You won’t have to worry about what people think.”
“Will the party be outside?”
“Inside and outside,” she answers. “But you can mask inside, I won’t let anyone give you shit for that.”
It’s about the best you could ask for, you suppose, briefly. Then you correct yourself: of course it’s not the best you could ask for. But are you willing to push Michelle on it? She’s the type of person to appreciate you masking in close-quarters spaces, even admire you for it, but then not do it herself.
“Thanks,” you say. “I think I can make it.”
“Great!” Michelle looks relieved. “I’m glad.”
You both stand around for a moment. Your fungal arm slips on the doorframe and you have to catch yourself quickly. You look back up at Michelle sheepishly. “Did you want to come in?”
“I’d love to, but I’ve got a few more people to hand out invitations to. Sorry. You were my first stop.”
You try not to overanalyze this.
“Okay! I’ll see you later then.”
Michelle smiles again. “See you.”
. . .
You’re not sure about Michelle’s idea of passing off your fruiting body as a costume. You’re uncomfortable enough being visible in public at all – perhaps your mycelial aspect still craves the privacy of the underground – and it sounds even worse to invite extra attention toward what would inevitably appear to be a remarkably realistic costume.
Alternate idea: hide the fungus. Sadly this effectively means concealing your entire body. You imagine showing up to the party as a blanket ghost like Charlie Brown, covered and unidentifiable. Defeating the whole purpose of putting yourself out there.
Suddenly, an idea. You step onto your back stairs and pad down in your socks. The patch of dirt next to your building’s back drive supports a meager ecosystem of bushes and small trees. By this late in the month their leaves have mostly fallen, covering the cool wet ground. There’s a good chance of finding mushrooms fruiting under there. Tiny wet leaves cling to your socks as you cross the driveway. You crouch down and brush aside the nearest leaves. After some searching you come across a few groups of parasols, fortunately non-toxic varieties (though you’d hope nobody will be licking your costume anyway.) You gather up as many mushrooms as you can carry, cradling them in your fungal arm, and ball up some fallen leaves as well. Back inside you test using some tape loops and school glue to affix some leaves and mushrooms to your shoulder, arranging them to look like a forest floor.
It’s a compromise: keep the fungus visible but doll it up a little. Under your carefully landscaped autumn shroud your fungus recedes into the background, overshadowed by the picture-perfect little mushrooms and fall leaves. When the night of the party comes you repeat the process to create your costume. With satisfaction you realize that, rather than looking disheveled, you’re as cute as you’d hoped. You. Are. Fall.
. . .
You. Are. Falling. Asleep.
It’s nine o’clock. You arrived at the party around 7:15. What happened to your endurance? You knew you couldn’t longer handle strenuous physical activity for very long, but you’re disappointed to learn just standing around talking with strangers and acquaintances is almost as taxing. You’ve only had a beer and a shot, but you wonder if maybe the fungus doesn’t like it. (One time you Googled “mushroom and alcohol interaction” and were met with a wall of research hospital articles. More considered phrasings of the search yielded inconclusive information.) Your side hurts in an odd way; you must have pulled a muscle bending down to apply leaves earlier. In any case, you’re exhausted and cruising for a snoozing. You let Michelle know you’re leaving and bid everyone else an Irish goodbye this Samhain.
The party went well, all things considered. A couple uncomfortable looks and oblivious questions about the online campaign aside, people were welcoming. Many guests had never heard of you or Universal Veil, thankfully. Michelle facilitated as well as she could, introducing you to acquaintances she thought you’d gel with. A tabletop group invited you to join them for a campaign sometime, masking or remote attendance accommodated. It was a good night.
Pulling your baggy jacket a little tighter over your lumpy costume, you head outside and start the walk home.
. . .
Home again. You begin removing your costume. A gentle tug is sufficient to dislodge each accessory. Mushroom, mushroom, maple leaf, Twix wrapper – oops, how long was that stuck there? It’s an oddly soothing process, stripping off leaves like band-aids and fungal masses like scabs.
Until you find the first one that won’t peel away.
You yank the mass of white fungus on your side repeatedly, getting more alarmed with each attempt. Your skin stretches and stings, but the mass refuses to come off. You dig your fingernail in to try to pry it off by the seam, but there is no seam. Instead the base of the mass is covered in a web-like white membrane you recognize as a universal veil. Gently pulling apart its strands, you uncover supple raw skin fusing with the white mass. The fungus you just put on a couple hours ago is becoming part of you.
Not again.
You test the rest of the costume. In all, you’ve gained four new fungal patches. One has even expanded slightly to envelop part of a leaf, which it seems to be slowly consuming. No wonder you’re tired; integrating four new organisms is hard work. You wonder if your consciousness will be affected, or if you’d even register if it were. How will meshing together five minds compare to just two? Do the fungi growing behind your building even have minds?
You’re too tired to think about this. Skipping a shower and throwing your pajama bottoms straight on, you resign yourself to bed. Despite the fatigue, you can’t escape contemplating the new knowledge that you can integrate with fungi other than your original. Some kind of longing accompanies this thought; as of yet you don’t understand what it’s for.
The new arrivals assert themselves first in a dream. As you drift into sleep, warm under your comforter as the newly chilly October breeze blows through your open window, a vision comes to you. No, not a vision, more of a spatial awareness, akin to the feeling of inhabiting your body, of will and sensation passing through and thus defining the ends of your fingertips without needing to see them. In this awareness you remember your distributed mycelial body permeating the soil. Only your fruiting bodies, your mushrooms, exist above ground; your vast majority has no need for open air. It’s a warm, comfy feeling, living in and of the earth even as it chilled and hardened over the last month. You’ve lost all this, but you feel ambivalence rather than resentment for having been taken from the soil. This new self is different, but given time it could prove greater. Transcendent in some fashion, at the least.
You fall asleep, six organisms increased to one, considering what each of you lost and gained.
