The Gorge

dir: Scott Derrickson

2025

Just as I was complaining about the kinds of films made specifically or exclusively for streaming services, I watched another movie made solely for a streaming service, being the Apple one. Compared to the other ones, almost no-one watches AppleTV+, I don’t know if you’ve noticed.

If they do, they let you know about it. If they have endlessly bored you with how much they cried watching Ted Lasso or how much they love season 2 of Severance, then they are of the happy few who bother to subscribe to it.

To the rest of the world it might as well be some obscure streaming site from Uzbekistan. This film, though, seems to have gotten some attention, reasons for which escape me, really. Neither Miles Teller nor Anja Taylor-Joy are box office draws, even if people might recognise them. The title is fairly non-illuminating nor is it arresting. A gorge. A valley. A dingly, dingly dell.

No, but this is about THE Gorge, which must have something interesting about it to justify a whole film about it, don’t you think?

Even if none of the elements are that novel, or original, the first hour of this flick, at least for me, were quite enjoyable. Ludicrous as the premise is, once I accepted it, I was able to go along with it and enjoy the interactions of the two main characters as they somehow meet cute and get to know each other before everything turns to shit.

Just like in real life.

Levi (Miles Teller) is a depressed former special forces type, and one of the best snipers in the world. Familiar as the set-up is, he maintains his melancholy demeanour for long enough that it informs the character, rather than just being something that’s mentioned at the beginning of a film as a signpost, swiftly forgotten from then on or never mentioned again. He is engaged in some secretive one year mission, mostly because he has no family or ties that would miss him were he to disappear permanently.

Drasa (Anja Taylor-Joy) is a Lithuanian sniper, one of the best in the world. We are introduced to her as she wakes up in a duck blind that she has been sitting in for several days, waiting for her prey to land at an airport. She too is contracted for this very special mission, but only after meeting her dad for a drink at her mother’s tombstone, with the dying man telling her he plans to off himself on Valentine’s Day.

That’s sad, but she still takes the year-long mission.

The two of them, separately, are sent to replace those who were standing guard across a vast gorge before them. We only see Levi’s induction, but it’s explanatory enough, and brutal enough, when the guy whose watch has ended thinks he’s going home, that we understand there must be something especially terrible about the gorge to warrant such rude behaviour.

Levi settles in to his new digs. He sits atop a tower constructed right on the edge of a vast gorge shrouded in clouds and mist. He is, as an American, naturally, in the Western Tower. He doesn’t know where in the world he is, because he was drugged / knocked out for the journey in. But he surmises it’s somewhere in the northern hemisphere.

His counterpart on the other side, in the Eastern tower, has the same job: maintain the turrets and mines, make sure the devices preventing this site from being viewable via satellite are constantly in operation, and kill anything that comes out of the gorge.

The distance between them is massive, but they have binoculars. They have been forbidden from engaging with each other, in this agreement of long standing that seems to date back to 1946. Since the end of WWII, someone representing the Allies, and some representing not the Axis but the Soviets has been looking out across this gorge and keeping the locals in line.

Supposedly, for the first time ever, East and West contact each other through writing messages on whiteboards or A3 sketch books, enquiring about each other’s well-being, favourite colours, musical choices etc.

This all might sound impossibly lame, but I actually enjoyed it a lot. This is not a film to take seriously, but at least they take their time, exactly one hour, to develop the main characters and get them to connect in ways that, had it occurred earlier or in a lazier fashion, would have seemed perfunctory.

During this extended meet cute, there is an attack from the denizens of the deep, which doesn’t tell us much about the threat they face, but it does make it seem like something awful is waiting to crawl up and devour the world. Considering the technology at play, the seriousness with which the threat seems to be addressed, it maybe is much later on when you start to think to yourself “if they were really this worried about it, you’d employ a legion of people on each side to make sure Hell on Earth is not unleashed, yeah? What if one of them stubs their toe, or breaks their leg: then they and the world are fucked, with no redundancies.”

But if you did any of that it would be a different film. This is more like watching two people in two distant lighthouses fall in love then and then face an unearthly set of horrors which are juxtaposed with the callous indifference of their employers, who, in the true spirit of the science fiction genre, find a bad situation and come up with so many ways to make everything worse for the planet and our protagonists.

Other than our two sniping lovebirds, there is another actor who gets minimal screen time, but it’s effective, at least in taking us out of this film and forcing us to think of a different one. No film can stand alone, so bringing in Sigourney Weaver to play a certain role, one which essentially makes her a high up in a Weyland-Yutani style corporation, can’t help but remind us of Aliens.

And, during the meet cute bit, there’s a montage sequence that has the two snipers playing chess, forcing us at gunpoint to be reminded of Anja Taylor-Joy’s role in the series Queen’s Gambit, and another scene has them both playing makeshift drums, to force us to remember Miles Teller in Whiplash. Haven’t we been traumatised enough?

They call the creatures in the gorge the Hollow Men, as a reference to a poem by TS Eliot, but they’re not the only poetry references you’re going to get, you lucky so-and-sos! Levi writes poetry too! And all the poor saps who’ve stood on the wall keeping watch over the years, have also scrawled their last impassioned favourite lines onto a wall hidden by a bookcase.

As a fan of poetry, it always amuses me to see how poetry is used in movies, especially contemporary movies. Seventy years ago, when actors had to memorise thousands of lines at a time, if a poem was mentioned in a movie, the actor, who had already delivered hundreds of witty lines in the same shot, would utter, with outstanding elocution, the poem in question in its entirety, whether it was the Rime of the Ancient Mariner or To His Coy Mistress.

But because we are a shallow species with a micro-second attention span (now), oh they’ll refer to a poem, but the most they’ll give you is a line. A single, stingy line, like a whole poem has a single punchline rather than dozens that work cumulatively, not in fragments.

Ah. Poetry. He says one line to her, and she swoons. Job done.

And then, once Drasa and Levi are in love, he pledges to let her read his next poem when he’s finished it, or if they survive the horrors below.

Is that a spoiler? I did say there was an hour of build-up before something goes wrong and they’re forced into the gorge. The next section, well, the rest of the film is them both desperately trying to get out of the gorge intermixed with finding out the scientific reason for what’s actually happening with these horrifying creatures down there. All the culprits you can guess are responsible, so this place represents a shameful blight on the honour of Americans, Brits and Russians.

But wait. There’s always ways to make things worse.

The latter half isn’t going to work as well for a lot of people, mostly because, to use the technical film theory terms, it all alternates between imagery from the coolest metal video clip you can think of, with some really fake looking shit. It’s stuff that makes you think about how this kind of acting mostly requires actors to run around with prop guns imagining all the things that are attacking them, which is then filled in later, and you know it could be dinosaurs or zombies or aliens and it wouldn’t matter one bit. Some of the action-y stuff is a bit more visceral than that, and that works fine. No-one’s going to confuse Miles Teller with Arnold Schwarzenegger or Anja Taylor-Joy with Linda Hamilton, but they do a good enough job of selling that they’re formidable killers and that they’re really very fit.

I’m not going to write off that second hour, because there were sections that were horrifying, like a church filled with skull spiders that will live in my nightmares for the foreseeable future, and they do spend a lot of money making the hellscape look hellscape-y. Unfortunately, the more they explain, the less I cared, until I just wanted them to blow everyone up so that we could all just go home.

Can’t go home again, though, can you. The river of time, it means the river’s not the same, and we’re not the same. Who knows how something as initially stable and formal, and in the end chaotic, as this should end. I think it was fine, however implausible (and, ye gods and little fishes, it is all so goddamn implausible). But who knows, maybe this could be a new franchise for Taylor-Joy and Teller! Another gorge pops up somewhere else, and the only two people in the world who could beat it are our two heroes here! It writes itself, like Levi’s poetry. Make it happen, Hollywood. Make it happen, AppleTV+.

7 times have I even told you just how gorge-ious you look today out of 10?

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“What’s worse than Death?”
-“This place is Evil!” – sounds cooler in a made-up Lithuanian accent - The Gorge

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2559363353/