Gaia (2021)

By Eric Botts & Meg Sipos

This week, we’ve got another Judgment for you. That’s our review section, in which we don’t rate or rank horror media with stars or numbers or skulls. We just talk about what we liked or didn’t like and what we thought was cool or interesting or kind of dull or poorly executed. In short, we tell you whether we think something is worth reading or watching.

This Halloween--in the midst of a global pandemic, during a time in which it feels like the Earth is pissed and wreaking vengeance for our centuries of industrialized destruction--we’re talking about the 2021 South African ecological and folk horror film, Gaia, directed by Jaco Bouwer.

You can watch it on Hulu as of this writing, 10/31/2021. (Happy Spooky Day, y’all!)

Dungeons & Fungizombies

We have a bit of a bias regarding this film’s concept. A really positive bias that made an already good movie all the more fun.

See, we’re not just horror nerds. We’re also Dungeons & Dragons nerds. Normally, we wouldn’t talk D&D here because that would be weird...but in this case, well, Eric’s currently running a game in which the players have been infected by fungus that grows on and inside your body and eventually turns you into a fungus zombie (“fungizombie!”) looking to spread its spores farther and wider until all is consumed.

Eric took this concept from an article about ants being infected by a fungus called ophiocordyceps unilateralis (in the game, we just call it cordyceps). This fungus causes zombified ants to climb onto leaves above the forest floor. There, they wait to die, during which time fungal horns grow from their bodies until they burst forth plumes of spores, infecting more ants and consigning them to zombie-death-reproduction.

So imagine our surprise when we turned on a movie featuring this same basic concept!

Maybe there’s something in the air. You know, like fungal spores that make you do their bidding and eat you from the inside out and sometimes grow up to be really angry mushroom people bent on killing all humans.

Gaia is a blend of ecological and folk horror, with a dose of the cosmic and apocalyptic thrown in for flavor. Screenwriter Tertius Kapp offers up a story about the fury and unknowability of nature, one that feels both contemporary and ancient at the same time.

The film begins as a forest ranger, Gabi (Monique Rockman), and her boss Winston (Anthony Oseyemi), venture into South Africa’s Tsitsikamma forest, opening on a dizzying shot from Gabi’s drone, which she flies while Winston rows them downriver in a canoe. She loses the drone’s signal just as its camera glimpses the face of a boy we’ll soon know as Stefan (Alex van Dyk).

He and his father Barend (Carel Nel)--dressed in rags, covered in mud, and setting simple, mechanical traps--take the disabled drone. Gabi sets off to find it, against the better judgment of Winston, who, in a slightly meta moment that seems both in reference to the behavior of white tourists and in reference to horror movies in general, tells her, “Sometimes you’re just like those whiteys: ‘Danger!’ ‘Oh, where? Lemme go see!’”

Still, she convinces him to drop her at a river bank and meet her in the next valley--because splitting up is obviously a good idea too, right?

After Gabi injures herself by setting off one of Barend and Stefan’s traps, the duo eventually find her, take her to their cabin, and nurse her back to health. Of course, during that time, a bunch of really bad fungal things happen.

We learn about the monstrous mushroom people who hunger for human flesh pretty quickly, and soon thereafter, fungal growths begin to emerge from Gabi’s arms and legs. Think of it as the nature equivalent of a zombie infection. She’s that character who gets bitten early on, who’s either holding out for a cure or trying to hide the reality of her slow, painful, and fatal transformation. Except in this one, the people around her know she’s infected, and might not be willing to offer up a potential cure. And from there, the film gets weirder and weirder, eventually culminating in a downright Biblical scene turned completely on its head.

The limited cast of characters works to Gaia’s great advantage, as the performances from all four of them are rock-solid, and in the case of Nel (our story’s patriarch, Barend), utterly and convincingly terrifying. His enthralling, dramatic monologue is one of the best examples of the excellent dialogue throughout the film, which is at turns bizarre and clever, perplexing and simple.

Despite its many strengths, the film stumbles in the same way a lot of post-’90s movies stumble (especially since the 2000s). In the old days of horror, a great concept with a well-written story and more-than-competent acting might have some cheesy special effects. Most of these effects were practical, because, even when computers started to come into common use, they couldn’t generate complex animations that looked even remotely realistic. At least, not at any affordable cost.

But cheesy practical effects are far more watchable than hokey computer-generated imagery. Take the zombies in 1968’s The Night of the Living Dead. Especially early on in the film, they’re downright silly. Maybe you even laugh at the fight sequence between Johnny and that first zombie in the graveyard. But those ridiculous zombies don’t get in the film’s way one bit. In fact, they might even help drive home the point that, in this movie, the living are more dangerous than the undead.

On the other hand, bad CGI pretty much ruined anything good about 2007’s I Am Legend. It also marred 2015’s The Final Girls, the second half of which is smothered in lame effects like bad wedding cake in fondant, leaving that gross plasticy aftertaste. And no one wants that.

The CGI team for Gaia did a technically competent job--they didn’t smother the wedding cake. But the animations all feel like they’ve been done a thousand times before--you know, like that tendril effect, where the tentacle robot or sentient smoke or vine monster or liquid alien slowly spirals out in little ringlets through the air, sneaking up behind you and snaking into your ear or wrapping around your face or, well, you know the effect. And it’s in this movie. A lot.

Then there’s the issue of the mushroom people. Don’t get us wrong; visually, they’re great. Really. The makeup is fantastic. But their behavior feels on par with a lot of things you’ve seen before, and it also doesn’t make much sense. They do that half-crouch predatory walk thing that seems to be in every movie that features a humanoid predator, and they screech in your face when any intelligent predator would just, you know, eat its prey.

They’re also blind, and the film makes that point way too significant. These creatures are supposedly evolved to hunt humans, but for some reason, their blindness makes them utterly incapable of hearing, or in some other way sensing, their prey unless you make an exceptionally loud sound. Basically, all you have to do to hide from these things is smear mud on yourself and not yell out or stomp.

The end result is some intense but uninteresting and, frankly, unnecessary action sequences that take away from the more compelling elements of body and existential horror that the film has to offer.

That said, while we didn’t care for the sometimes stock quality of the special effects, Gaia is underpinned by a great script, on-point performances, unsettling sound and cinematography, and a concept that’s obviously amazing because Eric had the same idea for his D&D game. And those qualities make it strong enough that the uninspired CGI mostly registers as a minor blip in an otherwise smart and engaging film.

If you like ecological, folk, and/or survival horror, Gaia is for you. If you like cosmic and apocalyptic horror with terrifying Biblical references, you should maybe give this one a shot.