Film Review

Gaia (2021)

A South African forest ranger encounters two off-the-grid survivalists, who soon reveal an alarming devotion to the forest.

What if there is a God, and he — she, it? — just doesn’t care much about us at all? That’s the source of terror underlying the more overt body-horror of Gaia, a superbly disconcerting trip into the South African forest from director Jaco Bouwer.

Publicity makes reference to Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) and Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018), but Gaia has little in common with either apart from some visual flourishes (e.g. the upside-down-camera trick that Aster uses so effectively, and the memorable fusion of plant and human life in Garland’s film).

What it does resemble, more strongly, is Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (2021), and even the basic premise is similar: a professional custodian of nature (in Wheatley’s film a soil scientist, here a forest ranger) encounters people living deep in the trees with fierce spiritual convictions about the natural world.