My ill-advised endeavor to watch the top 200 horror movies of all time, plus 100 additions, in order to determine a definitive (read: completely subjective) Top 100 continues.

Two forestry workers, Gabi (Monique Rockman) and Winston (Anthony Oseyemi), are on a routine trek in the Tsitsikamma forest of South Africa when one of their camera drones is taken down by a mysterious forest-dwelling man. Gabi sets out to recover the drone while Winston waits behind. Gabi is soon injured by a small-game trap set by the man, Barend (Carel Nel), and his son, Stefan, and the two take her into their shack to dress her wound. (Winston, meanwhile, is not so lucky, contending with the strange things the forest keeps secret.) It quickly becomes apparent that the man and his son, while not an immediate threat, even treating Gabi with kindness, aren’t merely survivalists, but harbor cult-like beliefs about the surrounding forest. Barend abhors technology, and has shunned modern life, preferring instead a simple life in the woods where he educates his son about the truly important things in the world. Like those that live amongst them in the trees and float on the wind, may they one day reach civilization, Gaia willing.

To say more would be to spoil a lot of the film’s strengths which lie in the slow, purposeful building of its world and ideology. There isn’t much new here—it’s fundamentally like numerous eco-horror stories that have come before—but the slow build, the protagonist stumbling into an ancient world she knows nothing about, slots Gaia firmly into the folk horror tradition, and I find it to be a worthy supplement to a subgenre that is continually sustained by the ever-evolving nature of humanity’s hindsight. Only in looking back do we see the horror in what we’ve done.

I would recommend this to fans of movies as disparate as Annihilation (2018), Monsters (2010), and Apostle (2018). Its themes of eco-consciousness, religious fanaticism, inhibited sexuality, and its stellar creature design/special effects makes it an easy recommendation.