By Seth Lukas Hynes
Gaia
Starring Monique Rockman, Carel Nel and Alex Van Dyk
Rated MA15+
3.5/5
Gaia is a 2021 South African sci-fi horror film with powerful yet derivative visuals and a scattershot plot.
Gabi (Monique Rockman) and Winston (Anthony Oseyemi), two forestry workers, encounter a pair of cultists and a deadly fungal organism in the wilderness.
Gaia has engaging performances and draws strong suspense from its characters. Barend (Carel Nel) is a fatalistic scientist who worships the sentient fungus in the forest (and has a phenomenal monologue in the second act), and his son Stefan (Alex Van Dyk) is a stolid young man with a gentle, curious streak. The film has several shocking but strangely beautiful scenes of body horror, with multicoloured, richly-textured fungi growing from its victims’ bodies. Gabi’s body-consuming infection grows alongside Barend’s nihilism and cruel intentions, with both threads culminating in a taut climax.
But even with the solid personal tension, Gaia has a meandering pace and vague world-building. The fungus-covered creatures in the forest rarely pose a threat, and their design is blatantly ripped off from the video game The Last of Us’s Clickers, even down to the rasping and clicking noises they make.
Gaia also relies too heavily on dreams for atmosphere, despite the film’s mostly grounded biological horror. There are even two contrived instances of Gabi waking up from a dream within a dream.
A horror film with compelling drama and striking imagery surrounded by murky themes and plagiarised monsters, Gaia is available on DVD and to rent or buy on iTunes.
– Seth Lukas Hynes
