Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Gaia’ on Hulu, a Satisfyingly Psychedelic Body-Horror Eco-Creature Feature

Psychedelic-mushroom Cronenberg-via-del-Toro eco-body-horror creepy-creature freakout Gaia was, unsurprisingly, a South by Southwest standout before a brief theatrical run, a VOD premiere, and now a run on Hulu. Director Jaco Bouwer shows a little of this one thing you’ll recognize, and references some of that, and one will soon conclude that his influences are all the right ones, the best ones, the ones that made us squirm and maybe even prodded our skull-noodles with a pointy stick. He and scripter Tertius Kapp throw in something original too, in the form of a mushroom man (do YOU know the mushroom man, the mushroom man, that lives on mossy lane?), an extremely strange fella who may be a major buzzkill for the protagonists. Or maybe he’ll get them tripping, and prove he’s just a really fungi!

GAIA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Drone shot: the South African forest. The horizon inverts, disorientingly. We buzz, upside-down, over a river, and in it we see a canoe, and in that, two people, before going rightside-up. Turns out that our drone’s-eye-view is via an actual drone — which is kind of an inside joke for film people who point and say DRONE SHOT at the inevitable drone shot in every movie ever — controlled by one of those people, Gabi (Monique Rockman). She and Winston (Anthony Oseyemi) are researchers with the forest service, making their rounds to check on the cameras they’ve set up to capture footage of, I dunno, bugs and ferns? Monkey antics? Deer porn? Doesn’t matter, because the insane stuff they’re about to see with their real eyes hasn’t wandered in front of their lenses before.

But I’m getting ahead of things here. Gabi buzzes the drone into the thick woods where a person snatches it from the air and stomps off. She decides to investigate, and Winston playfully chastises her: “Sometimes you’re just like those whiteys, huh? ‘Danger!’ ‘Where?’ ‘Oh, let me go see.’” She doesn’t notice all the weird sounds — the unsettling gurgles and cracking noises and droning hums — because I think they’re for us, not her. She stumbles on a tripwire and, well, let’s just say if her foot was a vampire, it’d be dead. The people who set the trap and have her drone are Barend (Carel Nel) and his teenage son Stefan (Alex van Dyk), survivalists who smear themselves with camouflaging mud for their daily hunt, then return to their battered cabin to cook its organs with fresh porcini mushrooms and a wiggling-grub garnish.

If there are any Deliverance vibes from these two, there’s not much Gabi can do about it, because there’s a big hole in her foot, big enough for the light to shine right through it. They’re helpful but weird, sharing their grubs and wrapping her wound with some backwoods mud-ointment that she has no choice but to trust. She drifts into sleep disturbed by strange dreams in which colorful toadstool-things grow out of her skin, and of course she rips them out as we clench. Meanwhile, Winston wanders through a bog looking for her, and encounters what I can only describe as a slimy, screeching humanoid with a clump of mealy morels where most of his face should be. Same for the cabin crew, who stave off one of the beasts with homemade knives and archery kits. As Gabi convalesces, she grows somewhat almost maybe comfortable as a guest of these far-off-the-gridders, although Barend sometimes tends to work himself up into a bit of a religious froth, and Stefan clearly hasn’t been around very many females in his life, probably zero to be honest. As for the fungus folk lurking out there, Barend says there’s a massive organism right beneath their feet that has birthed them, and this is when things start to get really weird.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Visual/tonal references to Annihilation and Aliens, The Evil Dead cabin/vine vibes, all things oogy Cronenberg, creatures likely inspired by Pan’s Labyrinth, a religious-fervor patriarch in the vein of The Witch, the fungal-spore horror of recent gem In the Earth, the kid-needs-to-get-out-of-the-woods-and-go-to-school arc of Leave No Trace and, of course, Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing (although I sensed more of the mold-fuzz of Alan Moore’s nutty and amazing ’80s comic books).

Performance Worth Watching: The core trio is strong, even working with slightly underwritten characters: Rockman as the one who’s slowly accepting that the world is a stranger place than she ever knew; van Dyk as the curious and innocent naif; Nel as the loon who keeps his crazy eyes mostly sheathed until the movie really needs them.

Memorable Dialogue: Barend gets a little Biblical with an anti-modernity rant: “You swarm like maggots around your neon towers and multiply exponentially in the glow of the whores and false goddesses dancing on the walls of the neon towers in the fire of infinite explosions! All you know is excess and devouring and more and more and more! Faster and faster over the abyss and into the very fires of hell where the smoke and brimstone will spew forth from your mouths…” It goes on like this for a bit. But he may have a point?

Sex and Skin: Equal-opportunity butts; female toplessness; squirmy suggestiveness and subtext.

Our Take: Funny, I was JUST noticing how we “civilized” members of the human race swarm like maggots around our neon towers and multiply exponentially in the glow of the whores and false goddesses dancing on the walls of the neon towers in the fire of infinite explosions. Crazy coincidence!

Within the unsettling weirdness of fetishy practical-effects horror, Bouwer and Kapp couch some loose commentary on the push-pull Mother-Nature-vs.-human-progress conflict, which seems increasingly, terrifyingly finite in this age of climate change. Which is worse? Gabi’s world of materialism and digital tethers, or scraping by in the wild, sharpening knives out of bones in case the mushroom folk barge in and spew their airborne germ-seeds in your face? How different is all this from your COVID fear of breathing the wrong air, of the Earth trying to eradicate us before we eradicate it? Maybe spore-spewing mushroom men are a piece of a metaphor, an age-old man-vs.-nature conflict in microcosm.

Gaia is visually potent enough for us to sense the humidity of this swampy forest, and to work up a good skin-crawl when yeasty floral blooms begin manifesting in places they normally don’t — is the movie really going to go there? No spoilers, but maybe a little. The thought of an unpleasant tactile sensation is what fuels body horror, and Bouwer successfully exploits it without evoking the outright repulsion of OTT gore, retaining the psychological sensuality, for lack of a better phrase, that’s actually more thoroughly disturbing. (By comparison, Bouwer goes a touch overboard with the sound design, the squelches and shrieks butting heavily into the film’s carefully curated atmospherics.) This isn’t a predictable film, and it’s unsteady, as if we’re not sure what’s going to happen, and we’re not sure if the filmmakers know either. But it concludes satisfactorily, with shocking and provocative shots, strange, beautiful and disgusting. It’s bleak, but memorable.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Bouwer exercises significant visual prowess with Gaia, which is enjoyably stimulating, and ultimately a little more than the mere sum of its influences.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch Gaia on Hulu