"Gaia" beautifully shot and unsettling eco-horror
Gaia (2021) South African director Jaco Bouwer’s ecological horror film “Gaia” takes place before an apocalypse, but something seems dread-inducing from the very start. Like “The Ruins,” “Annihilation" and, most recently, Ben Wheatley’s “In the Earth,” nature and the unknown retaliate against humanity in ways that are unsettling and oddly beautiful. It could work as a companion piece to those films with its flora imagery and ideas about metamorphoses, but “Gaia” more than stands on its own in the soil. When game ranger Gabi (Monique Rockman) and her boss, Winston (Anthony Oseyemi), are surveying the woods from a canoe on the river, they agree to meet back in an hour when one of their drones goes offline. Before the drone went black, Gabi caught sight of an emaciated, mud-smeared man in the forest. Winston states his bad feeling about splitting up, but Gabi insists, as she doesn’t want to leave their trash behind. Sure enough, Gabi gets caught in a trap set up by a Neo-Luddite f...