Any movie that tries to relay a message can often miss the mark and come across as cloying and preachy, so there was genuine skepticism when gorehounds first caught wind of the environmentally-conscious chiller Gaia.
After all, anyone with half a brain knows that nature is perhaps the single most powerful force on the planet given its penchant to wreak rampant destruction on a whim, so there was always the chance writer Tertius Kapp and director Jaco Bouwer ended up making the underlying themes too on-the-nose for everyone’s taste.
However, a Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 85 percent insinuated that the nerve-shredding terror more than complemented the ecological undertones, with Gaia additionally finding solace on the forums of Reddit, where it’s been deemed a hidden gem well worth digging up, dusting off, and then allowing to scare you witless.
A humble park ranger makes a routine trip into the forest to set the story in motion, where he encounters a pair of survivalists living off the grid with no interest in leading a modern lifestyle. The father and son come across as more than a touch cultish, which proves to be an understatement when creatures come out of the darkness to settle a score on anyone who dares leave their territory in a worse condition than they found it.
Gaia has proven fairly polarizing to be fair, but it gets its message across efficiently, while also bringing oodles of jump-scares to the table to satiate those with a taste for the gnarlier side of horror.