Gaia

Deep within a remote, untamed forest, researchers Gabi and Winston arrive to monitor the environment, but their routine mission quickly descends into a visceral nightmare. When the two are separated, Gabi is ambushed by a terrifying creature that emits unsettling, guttural growls. She is pulled from the brink by Barend and his silent companion, Stefan—two mysterious figures living in isolation within a rustic cabin. As Gabi recovers, she learns the harrowing truth about the woods: the forest is not merely a collection of trees, but a predatory, sentient ecosystem. Barend, a former plant pathologist, reveals the existence of an ancient, massive fungal organism that infects humans, feeding on their bodies while tethering them to a subterranean network. To Barend, this parasitic takeover is a long-overdue "reckoning" for a humanity he views as destructive vermin. Trapped in the cabin with her enigmatic hosts, Gabi must navigate a claustrophobic landscape filled with the constant, skin-crawling sounds of squelching and screeching. As she struggles to survive, she is forced to confront the terrifying possibility that the forest is reclaiming the Earth. With the fungal threat encroaching and her captors seemingly complicit in the spread, Gabi faces a desperate fight against an evolutionary force that views human dominance as a relic of the past. Will she escape the woods, or is the world already succumbing to a new, fungal intelligence?