Gaia

Gaia (2021) is a South African horror-fantasy directed by Jaco Bouwer that you can watch online on iFILM. A forest ranger follows a lost drone deep into an ancient reserve and stumbles onto two men — father and son — who have cut every tie to the outside world. Their religion is the forest. The forest, it turns out, is something that has been growing since long before humans named it.

Bouwer builds the threat from the ground up, literally: the danger in Gaia is fungal and rootbound, slow and inevitable rather than sudden. It puts ecological dread ahead of genre mechanics, and the result is one of the more unsettling horror films to come out of South Africa in recent years. Stream Gaia online on iFILM.