Main cast: Monique Rockman (Gabi), Carel Nel (Barend), Alex Van Dyk (Stefan), and Anthony Oseyemi (Winston)
Director: Jaco Bouwer
Forestry officers Gabi and Winston are traveling along a river in the Tsitsikamma region when, oops, Gabi loses control of their drone. She manages to convince a reluctant Winston to give her one hour to retrieve it. It won’t do to leave broken drones around in nature—Mother Nature won’t approve! Well, Mother Nature already has exerted her payback, it seems, as Gabi will soon encounter Barend and his son Stefan, two people that live like indigenous people in the area, and discover that a strange fungal strain has started to infect people, eating them from inside out. Give it up to Gaia, folks.
While in a way this movie is another rant about how we humans shouldn’t be so arrogant and think that we can do whatever we want with nature, it is also more of an existentialism horror film. There isn’t much here in terms of gore or body count. Rather, the fears come from this aspect of nature, intangible to most of us because we as humans have been on top of the food chain for so long, that, in the end, we are all just meat, fodder for parasitic life forms that will devour us from the inside and there is nothing we can do to stop this. It’s, after all, nature working as intended. What’s more chilling here is that the parasitism of our very being is visually rather beautiful here, for the want of a better word. Mother Nature is untamed, frightening, yet beautiful, even in the many ways she can slowly kill us.
For the most part, I suspect that Gaia will bore folks that are looking for a more action-packed kind of horror. It’s very slow moving and relies heavily on atmosphere to deliver the chills. I like this, personally, and I find myself intrigued by the concept of this movie. For the most part of the movie, I am fascinated by the interplay of beauty and even poetry of decay and consumption as portrayed here. There is a pseudo-cosmic horror feel to the whole scenario—in the end, we are all insignificant beings destined to decompose to fuel the growth of new life—and given that this is nature just being nature, so the horror itself stems from our fear of death and, in the long term, the possibility that there is no greater meaning to our existence aside from just being transient carbon material to fuel the cycle of life.
Unfortunately, things become tad ridiculous as the movie heads into its final half an hour or so. This movie works best when it is dealing with themes of death, decay, corruption, and parasitic infestation in a rather philosophical manner. It is less successful after it introduces a tangible villain as well as unveils the big bad monster, so to speak. Once these elements are introduced, Gaia becomes a far more standard film and hence, disappointingly mundane compared to what it had been up to that point.
Still, it’s not every day that I come across a movie like this works well enough to have me pondering a bit on the beauty of being a walking mushroom farm, so I think Gaia is definitely worth a peek for folks that are into a more esoteric kind of film in the horror genre.
