[SXSW 2021 World Premiere Review] Gaia is a Goregously Shot Eco-Horror Story About Religion

Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia opens on a stunning drone shot that zooms over a primordial South African forest split by a river. The camera traverses this river until the angle is reversed and the water is on the top, the sky on the bottom, perfectly mirroring the land in an uncomfortably uncanny valley way. It’s soon revealed to be a drone operated by Gabi (Monique Rockman) who is with her forestry services partner Winston (Anthony Oseyemi)  to survey the land. As her drone continues into the deep forest, it stops in front of a mud-slicked young man eventually named Stefan (Alex Van Dyk) before being smashed, off-screen, by Stefan’s father Barend (Carel Nel). 

After a brief argument with Winston, who tells her not to be like a foolish white person and investigate, Gabi does just that, but her reasoning is sound. They are intruders in this pristine world and they shouldn’t leave their trash behind. This idea of modern world intruding on an ancient land is a theme that continues throughout Gaia, as it ponders the connective tissue between religion, technology and nature.

But first, Gabi has to get lost.

And she does after springing a makeshift trap that jams a sharpened spear through her foot. While her screams resonate through the forest all the way through Winston, he, too, finds himself lost in a swampy bog filled with mushrooms. The camera focuses on these mushrooms and their spores in the same way the cinematographer did in Alien: Covenant, giving this film an equally alien and ominous undertone. When the unnatural clicking sounds start to follow Winston as he trudges through the ominous swamps, Gaia feels otherworldly in a similar way.

Eventually, Gabi hobbles to a homemade hut in the woods that is eventually revealed to belong to Barend and his son Stefan. An uneasy truce solely develops between the three of them as Gabi learns that the woods are hunted by monstrous fungus that takes root in humans and creates equally horrific monsters. Gaia takes a cue from The Last of Us (and to a lesser extent, The Girl with All the Gifts) by crafting fungal monsters that look suspiciously like Clickers. Gaia doesn’t fully explore the idea of Cordyceps, but it uses its premise of a fungal infection multiplying in a human’s body until they’re rendered sightless with an ominous (and familiar) clicking sound.  

While the film is punctuated with moments of horror as the creatures lurch forward and it's trailing mycelium stretches from the trees towards its victims, Gaia is more interested in exploring the conflict between technology, nature and religion. Barend tells Gabi that he retreated to the forest with his son and dying wife so she could live out her final days where they fell in love. And after cancer finally took her life, the two men stayed in the forest for thirteen years.

Stefan feels like a primal man, an Adam in the wood’s Eden who hasn’t seen a woman since his mother’s death. Gabi tries to coax some modern sensibilities into him, but he stares at her technology with a mix of magical awe and fear; he calls a picture of a truck on her phone “a monster.” Barend, meanwhile, wants nothing to do with the outside world. He has created his own version of godly Edenic beauty here in the primordial forest. He’s created scripture based on the mushroom fungus that grows beneath their very feet and when he prays, he calls out to the “Mother of Creation and Destruction…you are the Earth and we are your children!” He’s even created an eternal conflict between his Goddess and man as he refers to the Industrial Revolution as a declaration of war. It’s a war, he says, that “She” has been losing ever since. 

Gaia brings up questions you’d typically see in an eco-horror film, contrasting humanity as animals locked in a cage of their technology with the pristine, beautiful and untainted forest cinematographer Jorrie van der Walt captures beautifully. The film is stunning, with vivid colors that pop and combinations of naturalistic shots mixed with closeups contrasted against oftentimes dizzying perspectives and mirror images. But the forest is also the set piece of a more traditional Christian narrative that alternately casts Barend as the Creator and its prophet. He offers up sacrifices and tithes to the fungal god and preaches about the evils of mankind. Gaia tips its hand to its representation of Adam and Eve through the relationship that develops between Stefan and Gabi, with the poisonous fruit of knowledge and technology creating conflict between father and son. 

It doesn’t completely work because even though Barend states that his God existed before the creation of Christianity, the film itself can’t quite decide if it wants to be an indictment of technology or an examination of Christian creation myth. Comparisons will be made between Gaia and Ben Wheatley’s similarly ecological story of mythology and technology in In the Earth. But Gaia doesn’t explore it enough and wastes part of the second act with a focus on whether Gabi should (or can) leave the forest. Too much of the narrative focuses on Gabi’s attempt to leave which are thwarted so most of the thematic weight is then forced to the rising action and third act. 

That said, Gaia is easily one of the best films to come out of SXSW 2021. The mix of pure monstrous set pieces and body horror with a theological and technological mindset worked really well. It’s also tremendously shot, with lush photography, editing and sound design. Keep an eye on this one.