Mark Reviews Movies: GAIA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 17, 2021

The threat of Gaia seems to be one thing, then another, then back to the first, and, finally, some merging of the two potential antagonists. The way in which screenwriter Tertius Kapp plays this kind of back-and-forth-and-back-again with the villain of this story points to a bigger problem with the movie as a whole. It's about the central mystery and the gradual process of uncovering it, not any of the ideas this tale does, might, or could possess.

There's plenty of potential, too. Here, two forest rangers face the possibility of being hunted by loners, who have made a simple life of surviving in the vast woods, but then, Kapp subverts those seemingly obvious expectations. These two guys are secretive survivalists, but their seemingly threatening intentions are more a case of the rangers happening to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Someone or something—or somethings that used to be someones—are in the forest, having the appearance and behavior of a supernatural entity. It's better, perhaps, to call these foes something hyper-natural.

The core idea of Kapp and director Jaco Bouwer's movie, set in and filmed within the lush and atmospheric forests of South Africa's Tsitsikamma National Park, is about nature—living with it, humanity's seemingly suicidal urge to destroy it, the possibility that nature itself will be the entity to have the last laugh and the final say on our interference with the planet. It's also, in more human terms, about extremism, because, if the planet is doomed and humans are the cause of that destruction, there's a pretty clear and clearly horrifying answer to the former problem. It's horrific for humanity, at least.

All of this is presented in one form or another within the story, which frames itself as a sort of evolving horror tale. The stakes are personal, at first, and by the end, they take on apocalyptic importance. That actual process of narrative evolution, though, doesn't quite work here. Everything about the story—from its characters, to its plotting, to its underlying ideas—is so limited that the script feel as if it's running in circles, moving from scare to scare and revelation to revelation until it simply arrives at its inevitable conclusion.

Our protagonist is Gabi (Monique Rockman), a forest ranger surveying the woods with fellow ranger Winston (Anthony Oseyemi) and a helpful drone. The drone's camera sees the first signs of potential trouble for the two rangers, as it happens upon a scantily dressed, mud-covered man, who knocks the flying device to the ground.

A curious and surprisingly calm Gabi decides to retrieve the damaged drone ("We can't leave our litter behind"), and Bouwer displays a good understanding of suspense in the following sequence. We see the mysterious man and his equally mysterious younger partner set up a trap, and then, we witness Gabi gradually make her way unwittingly toward it. Winston, meanwhile, is distracted by a croaking sound in the woods, and his fate sets up the other potential threat in the forest.

The rest of the story has Gabi in the care of and learning about the guys living in the woods: Barend (Carel Nel), a scientist and a widower, and his teenage son Stefan (Alex van Dyk), who doesn't speak much and is fascinated by the presence of a woman for assorted reasons—but mainly one (Gabi's own eventual interest in Stefan is odd in multiple ways—and discomforting for a major one). They have lived here for about a decade, before and after the death of Barend's wife and Stefan's mother.

The real threat is a strange fungus that grows and has become more prevalent in the woods recently. It releases spores into the air and can infect a human, making the person a host for the plant and transforming one into a monster.

Those are the basics of the plot, and Kapp more or less sticks to the basics throughout this tale. Gabi is occasionally haunted by dreams—and, in that cheapest of cheap tactics, dreams within dreams—of the spores, the plants, and the monsters. Monsters croak and groan off-screen, and at times, the trio has to battle them.

After the stranded ranger digs through the survivalists' things, Barend eventually reveals a bit about his family's scientific research and past. All of that eventually leads to his real reason for living here and his true intentions with the rapidly spreading fungus (He uses passages from the Bible to back up those ideas, and at least two sequences here cleverly mirror famous stories from the book).

While there's plenty of potential and atmosphere and rising dread to this story, it's also undermined by a dearth of characterization (Barend is the strongest of the bunch, although he's given a whole manifesto to substantiate his beliefs) and a decided ambivalence toward any of the ideas Kapp introduces. Just when Gaia should be building toward a climax and some sense of a driving thesis, it becomes more obscure and dream-like, unsure of its purpose and goals.

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