THE GORGE - Mark Reviews Movies

The Gorge, Apple Original Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 13, 2025

For a while, it almost doesn't matter what's in the gorge at the, by way of the sheer scope of some of the framing here, sometimes-literal center of The Gorge. Screenwriter Zach Dean and director Scott Derrickson take a story revolving around a strange puzzle, involving the decades-long cover-up of something unspeakable, and focus it on a pair of lost, lonely, and psychologically wounded characters. That's an unexpected surprise, although the story's inevitable turn toward revealing the truth of that central mystery takes it to slightly disappointing and familiar ideas and action.

First and for a while, though, there are simply the main characters, which is something, to be sure, in what becomes a loud and frantic chase/fight through a kind of hell. The basic premise is that there exists a gorge somewhere in some undisclosed location.

Following the end of World War II and in the nascent period of the Cold War, the gorge was discovered, was explored, and became a source of great but uniting terror for countries on both sides of that political conflict. There was something in that deep, expansive chasm, and after a joint military expedition resulted in thousands of soldiers presumably dying inside the misty ravine, the operation became an international effort to ensure that nothing could escape the place and no one could find it.

It's properly enigmatic and spooky stuff, told to Levi (Miles Teller), an elite sniper who was in the U.S. military and now does occasional contract work for private security firms, when he arrives on one side of the gorge. He has been recruited by the mysterious Bartholomew (Sigourney Weaver), because pretty much everything is a riddle in the early stages of the story, to spend a year standing guard in a tower over the western edge of the chasm.

With no family or friends or personal connections of any kind of which to speak, Levi is the perfect candidate to drop everything for this job and possibly die doing it. Early on, the film lets us know this is a suicide mission. It's just that no one who takes the gig is aware of that fact until it's too late.

Levi's counterpart on the eastern side of the ravine is Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), a Lithuanian woman who is also, coincidentally, an elite sniper who takes contracted jobs and kills with some amount of remorse. She does have a family or, at least, a father (played by William Houston), who informs his daughter that people are on to her after her last assassination and that he has decided to take his own life before the cancer that has spread through his body does. It's best if she goes into hiding for a year or so, and presumably, being isolated in a watchtower that's off every known grid in the world is the perfect spot for that.

On paper, this is a lot of setup, but in practice here, Dean's script gets to each point in quick succession, while Derrickson generates an air of equal parts loneliness and dread. It all builds to the two characters, so similar but separated by a physical gap and the protocol that neither side should communicate with the other, realizing two things.

The first is that they do want to talk to each other. The second is that the gorge is filled with monsters that occasionally try to climb the rock walls and need to be killed by hanging mines, automated turrets, and whatever guns the two have available to them.

The communication part, surprisingly, takes up about half of the film or so, as Levi and Drasa exchange handwritten messages and gestures read through binoculars, show off their respective shooting skills, sneakily flirt with each other, and console one another as their pasts and current situation become a bit too much. The bond that forms is kind of sweet, as strange as that may sound with the characters' backgrounds and the presence of ferocious creatures threatening to kill them, but there's a palpable chemistry between Teller and Taylor-Joy that overcomes the literal distance between the characters and cements once the two figure out a way to eliminate what divides them. The whole thing is contrived, of course, but if such contrivances lead to some believable connection between two characters, that's far from a terrible thing.

Indeed, even the film's second-half turn to action and horror isn't too much of a shift, because the filmmakers have promised it almost from the start. It won't mentioned how Levi and Drasa ultimately encounter the monsters or what those creatures are, of course, but the extended climax of this plot is fairly dynamic.

It's essentially a series of action setpieces taking place in a multi-color-tinted nightmare-scape, filled with creeping fog and self-contained lightning storms and a slew of grisly sights. One almost forgets Derrickson's background in and affection for horror until that point, and this section seems to exist for the director to show off what he can do with a sizeable budget and few limits on his imagination.

Actually, the second half is not as disappointing as it might seem. Setting up the central relationship gives us a reason to care about this running-and-shooting-and-hiding tour through a hell on Earth, while the tour itself is so over-the-top in its vision of that nightmarish realm and filled with different types of action that it pays off the seemingly predictable premise in big ways. The Gorge sets out to do two distinct things, and it succeeds at both. What more, really, should we expect or want?

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