SXSW 2021: GAIA Review – Sporadically Frightening and Spellbinding Eco Horror Movie
Starring Monique Rockman and Carel Nel
Written by Tertius Kapp
Directed by Jaco Bouwer
:Synopsis: In the depths of an ancient forest, something has been growing. Something older than humanity itself, and perhaps greater too. When a park ranger discovers a man and his son living wild, she stumbles onto a secret that is about to change the world.
Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia is simultaneously frightening and infuriatingly dense. Two park rangers stumble upon a father and son living in the woods while on a surveillance mission in the Tsitsikamma forest of South Africa. As night falls and the verticality of the primordial woods upends their sanity, audiences are posed to be bewitched, awestruck, and– frankly– intermittently bored.
A jamboree of subgenres, Gaia is most effective when embracing the mythic, almost biblical stakes of its deeply intimate survival tale. Gaia, in Greek mythology, is the personification of earth, an antediluvian deity and ancestral mother of all living things. Though never given a name, the plot of land where Barend (Carel Nel) and Stefan (Alex van Dyk) is atop a speculative God, a mother, both creator and destroyer of life on earth. After a chaotic opening wherein Gabby (Monique Rockman) and Winston (Anthony Oseyemi) are pursued by strikingly realized fungal creatures, Gabby is taken in by the family in the woods and the tale of this ancient being is unspooled at an inordinately slow pace.
The opening siege is chaotic and emblematic of Gaia’s worst instincts. It’s unclear whose Gabby and Winston are, what they’re doing in the woods, or what is pursuing them. It’s chaos for chaos’s sake, with no grounding or sense of place. Darkness and noise punctuated by fleeting glimpses of something, a decision made all the more baffling by the creature’s inevitable reveal. The early sense is that the obfuscation is deliberate, a narrative and filmic technique intended to amplify the impact of the creature reveal. When the creature is finally revealed, though, the stellar design work of the primeval fungal beasts, lands with a whimper. Years gestating in the womb of Mother Earth was all for naught.
Gaia then settles into formula. Another creature appears, the characters hide or fight, and then settle into a laconic, hazy series of vignettes to bridge the gap before the next jolt of action. Gabby suffers from hypnagogic hallucinations, repeatedly waking from disorienting, topsy-turvy nightmares, the sole audience for dense monologues of a time before her own, a time where the whole world ostensibly looked no different than this monstrous, mythic slice of land. Barend and Stefan, meanwhile, traipse through the woods, besieged by red auras in the tree line and cacophonous, humanoid clacks, a series of baroque survivalist still lifes. They’re gorgeously composed, yes, but it’s nothing that’s never been seen before.
The dialogue is often as jungly as the setting, replete with cryptic references and long, swirling, hellish descents into incomprehensibility, spoken in both English and Afrikaans. It’s Gaia’s best and worst instincts at odds with one another. For as gratuitous as the dialogue often is, there are nuggets of worthwhile ideas in there. The pathology of plants, the unseen God just beneath the surface, and the way fungi– and, by extension, the worst instincts of humankind– feed on organic beings and repeats itself until nothing is left, while not strictly speaking new, is nonetheless profound, imbuing an overtone of gravity and weight to the proceedings.
Those earth-shattering stakes– it is alluded to in both dialogue and action that the God of the woods plans to expand its influence beyond its current isolation– are too often supplanted, however, by the conventional tale of a woman escaping her captors. Not unlike In the Earth earlier this year, the metaphysical horror elements are awkwardly wedged alongside more streamlined genre thrills to mixed results. Indeed, as a horror story, the elements are not quite incongruous and abstract, but still not quite altogether there. It’s too conventional to qualify as something brazenly disruptive, but too reflective and meditative for to qualify as something more immediately satisfying and watchable.
At one point, a character remarks that nature itself is a lot like scripture, and that’s as good a way as any to condense Gaia to its core. Mileage will likely vary based on one’s own predisposition toward mythic tales of biblical grandeur and allegory. Gaia is a movie where humanity’s demise is of their own making and where men have intercourse with trees in Antichrist compositions (minus the testicular trauma). There’s a lot of material here, and for those willing to put in the work, I can almost guarantee that Gaia will become a more midnight favorite. For others, though, Gaia isn’t much unlike parables of Sunday school. Daring and symbolic, they work well enough in the moment, but afterwards, there’s little left to hold on to.
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Gaia
Summary
Though Gaia intermittently casts an enchanting and frightening folkloric spell, it is too overstuffed and beholden to the genre’s past to resonate as profoundly as it intends.
