Sometimes, you think you know what you’re in for when you go into a movie and it ends up being something else - either in a sly subversion of the premise or what is just a hard swerve out of nowhere. There’s something appealing to me about going into something with expectations that get firmly upended. You watch enough genre films, you’ll start to get a sense of what the beats are going to be. So anything that jolts me out of that is going to be welcome. At least, it will be when it’s done well, This is the biggest problem with Gaia. There’s a good, effective body-horror story in this film somewhere, and it’s a pity that that’s not the story it ultimately chooses to tell.
It opens on a vertiginous shot of a vast, unbroken expanse of forest that slowly upends itself in a way that is disorienting. It’s a good moment, really establishing a sense of nature as something alien and hallucinatory, but as one of those people who’s watched a lot of genre films, all I could think was “wow, drone shots are starting to turn into their own sort of cliché, aren’t they?”…before it cuts to someone in a canoe, on a river, flying a drone. Well-played, film, well-played.
There are two people in the canoe - Winston and Gabi. They’re rangers for the South African forestry service, out doing surveys, collecting footage from stationary cameras, making sure nothing’s amiss. Gabi’s piloting the drone and it’s about two kilometers out when it collides with something, or someone and loses signal. This isn’t good, it’s expensive equipment and they don’t want to leave their trash in the forest. Winston doesn’t want Gabi to go out alone - people disappear in these forests - but she insists she’ll be fine and won’t be gone long. Meanwhile, two figures dressed in handmade rags, covered in mud, move slowly through the forest. One of them has the drone strapped to his back. They smear mud of the lenses of the rangers’ cameras. They set booby traps in the forest.
People disappear in these forests.
Gabi discovers that the two mysterious figures are Barend and Stefan - father and son who have left the modern world behind to live off the grid in the forest. Not just living off of the land, worshipping the land. Specifically, a giant mycorrhizal network spanning the breadth of the forest. A vast, singular organism that, as Barend puts it, was old before apes even started dreaming of gods. It is ancient, huge, and its spores have a way of taking over those exposed to them, until none of their humanity is left. This is why they set traps, and Gabi is, effectively, trapped with them in their ramshackle cabin in the middle of the forest.
In ways both large and small, this film bears more than a bit of a resemblance to In The Earth - they take place in two very different parts of the world, in two very different cultural contexts, but both concern themselves with people who go into the forest for work and discover hermits living there, in the middle of something vast and strange at a point where nature becomes something entirely other. A vast fungal network underlying the forest is important in both cases, as are ideas about what our relationship to nature is or should be or even can be. Coincidentally, really unpleasant foot injuries are also key to both films. I don’t think it’s plagiarism or anything as much as convergence on common themes (both were written and made in the middle of COVID-19 lockdown, which was certainly fertile ground for malevolent-nature stories). And both have their shortcomings, but I think In The Earth comes out of the comparison better, because although Gaia has a lot of what you’d need for a good, visceral take on nature at its most indifferent and alien (something In The Earth largely forsakes for a more cerebral approach and a barrage of psychedelia), it decides instead that it primarily wants to be the story of the dynamic between Gabi, Barend and Stefan. And honestly, the characterization isn’t there to support it. It’s got all this other compelling stuff around parasitic plant life and body horror that it effectively relegates to the background by the halfway point. In The Earth, for its faults (mostly a messy ending), creates a mood of real tension and danger, mostly around the people in this strange landscape. This film squanders a vivid, more conventionally horror-based expression of that same landscape for what is effectively a relationship drama. And relationship dramas are fine, but it’s not what we came here for and the characters aren’t fleshed out enough for us to really care at that level.
And it sucks, because it really is a vividly told story when it’s good. Microphotographic shots of plants and time-lapse footage of sprouting fungi, floating spores and branching tendrils really work to sell the almost Lovecraftian otherness of the deep forest, and the ecosystem that holds sway out there, centered around a massive fungal presence that almost seems to breathe, makes for some really striking and unsettling body horror. It’s not entirely without precedent, but it’s definitely not your stock infection narrative - there’s a resemblance to some of the imagery from Annihilation (and the video game The Last Of Us, which is getting its own adaptation on HBO soon enough), but it isn’t really derivative. It’s less in the service of surrealism and more meant to unnerve us, which it does quite well. There’s an icky, visceral tactility to it because it takes things we see in nature all the time and puts them in contexts which make you sort of realize that yeah, something like this could very well be out there, waiting for us to delve too greedily and too deep, to burrow into our flesh and begin to sprout.
At least, when that’s the story and imagery that’s at the forefront of the film, which it is only fitfully, and in a way that doesn’t really sustain a sense of dread. This is another problem with the film - it’s got all the right parts, but they’re put together in a way that largely undercuts their impact. The film’s pitched in such a way that we’re supposed to think that Gabi only gradually realizes that Barend and Stefan might not be entirely benevolent, but it’s clear early on that they have their own agenda. Rather than gradually building to a reveal of just how far the fungal organism has spread and what it’s actually done to people and the forest, things that feel like major revelations are sort of dropped in here and there without a lot of buildup or sense of their importance, and though they’re moments that are impressive and still startling in and of themselves, they don’t really hang together because they’re seeded in between the development of a dynamic between Gabi and Barend and Stefan, and in the second half of the film, that seems to be what the filmmaker’s more interested in exploring.
And there’s not much to explore there, as it turns out. Not that they’re cartoons (well, Barend starts getting there toward the end), just that we don’t know much about them one way or the other. It’s a very terse film in terms of dialogue, which is fine and for a story focused on the threat all around them that’d work well, but for a character and relationship study, it falls short. We don’t really know why Gabi makes some of the choices she does, Stefan is largely a cipher, almost a Tarzan to Gabi’s Jane, and Barend goes from having some potential depth to ranting fanatic, right on cue. There is, on the other hand, some interesting subtext with Barend, in that you have this highly educated Afrikaner rejecting modern civilization and presuming to go native and in the process decide that he in effect knows what’s best for humanity. Meanwhile, you’ve got African natives Gabi and Winston, working to preserve the land that Barend’s decided he understands better than everyone else. It echoes South African colonialism, and though it’s never explicitly addressed, I don’t think it needs to be. It might just be down to opportune casting, but it does give the film in whatever form it takes a little bite it otherwise wouldn’t have had.
There’s a lot of vivid, disturbing imagery, and to the extent that this is a monster movie, the designs are supremely creepy and the effects entirely believable. This is a film with a good sense of restraint about how and how long to keep creatures on camera, so the mystery’s never really dispelled. On the other hand, the filmmakers made the puzzling choice to locate as much of the horror in nightmare sequences as in actual happenings, even though they’re both pretty similar in imagery and outcome. Usually nightmare sequences are used to communicate some kind of oncoming dread in a way that violates our understanding of the real world, so it doesn’t make much sense for the nightmares to be of things that actually end up happening in the waking world. It feels redundant, and nightmares get used often enough that it starts to feel repetitive and tiresome. There’s one extended hallucination sequence (because, again, fungi and Mother Nature, it’s kind of the law) that, oddly enough, feels if anything a little pedestrian given what we’ve already seen elsewhere.
And finally, though the end of the story proper is a very evocative sequence, it feels sort of anticlimactic, and then there’s a coda that’s not just a “the end...OR IS IT?” cliché, but manages to be preachy in the process. I get wanting your film to Say Something, but I think one thing some filmmakers miss is that a very straightforward film is just as capable of that, if not more, than one where the filmmakers are consciously trying to communicate a message. That ends up being clumsy and didactic, as it is here, and so the film ends with kind of a thud.
The movie about the utter unknowability and mystery and indifference of nature, about how our bodies aren’t necessarily our own, that movie would have been a pretty straightforward monster film with some great almost Lovecraftian touches in malevolent nature. But trying to actively make points about mankind and nature and our relationship to each other and to nature and What It All Means just ends up feeling kind of callow and missing the mark. It certainly takes a hard swerve into the unexpected, just not in a way that’s at all satisfying.
IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
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