The Gorge Review

Somewhere remote and undisclosed, cloaked by fog, foliage, and stealth technology, a mysterious chasm gapes vastly. This is the title anomaly of The Gorge, a big-canvas creature feature available this week (some would say stranded) on the small canvas of Apple TV+. What comes out of the Gorge, scaling the sides of the walls built around its edges, is the stuff of nightmares; Hollow Men, they call the shrieking and crawling escapees. What goes in the Gorge is never seen again, just like movies that premiere on Apple TV+. The mysteries of that yawning pit are no more vexing than the matter of what comes to theaters and what doesn’t these days. While a glorified TV movie from Marvel Studios takes over the multiplex, a much more striking sci-fi action flick about radioactive monsters disappears into the streaming abyss.

Directed by Scott Derrickson, whose Doctor Strange remains one of the more visually appealing Marvel movies, The Gorge fleetly sets up its Twilight Zone premise. We learn about the Gorge with Levi (Miles Teller), the decorated marine sniper headhunted by an intelligence bigwig so steely and confident, she could only be played by Sigourney Weaver. (As always, the automatic Alien associations are a bonus, an implicit endorsement for a story about spindly beasts emerging from the darkness.) As a world-ranked marksman, Levi is uniquely qualified to oversee a hellmouth. Before he knows it, he’s relieving his predecessor from yearlong guard duty and assuming his place within one of the two watchtowers positioned on each side of zombie valley. It’s a bit like the Berlin Wall, in that the East and the West each have eyes up high.

So what is the Gorge? One could be forgiven for wondering if it’s a Cloverfield nest, given the mist of J.J. Abrams-style intrigue. Not that the film is all puzzles and castle sieges. Quite to the contrary, The Gorge is almost equally invested in the romance that develops between Levi and his tower counterpart, sharp-shooting KGB scion Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), who’s introduced firing a kill shot from a crow’s nest in the opening scene. Their meet-cute is through binoculars. He’s a little bit country, she’s a little bit rock ’n’ roll. They trade written messages, and flirt with bullets like the star-crossed rivals of a Franz Ferdinand anthem. One montage even lines up dueling inside jokes for the stars, cutting from a game of chess to consecutive bucket-drum solos.

The screenwriter, Zach Dean, has a weakness for unblemished military heroes; see also his script for The Tomorrow War, which pitted an almost messianically flawless Chris Pratt against similar waves of toothy menace. Teller’s Levi could use a few more kinks in his armor, maybe a little of the prickliness the actor brought to Whiplash. He’s not just the best shot in the world, but also a deceptively smooth dancer and a humble poet (though not humble enough, judging from the quick glimpse we catch of his verse). All he really seems to lack is common sense – the kind that might compel someone to ask who they’re actually working for and what happens to the pointedly unattached contract killers like himself after their classified year at the Gorge is up.

The first hour is charming and inventive. With scant dialogue, Derrickson plays out what’s essentially a COVID courtship – a long-distance romance where the distance is a grand canyon of doom. Teller is more convincing as a quiet loner slowly letting his guard down than as the smitten guy he becomes once that wall falls. But he’s lifted up by Taylor-Joy, playfully relishing a Baltic accent, enormous eyes sparkling with the joy she dimmed to play Furiosa. When the two dance to a twinkling Yeah Yeah Yeahs ballad in the moonlight, you almost forget that you’re watching a romance between ruthless mercs. Is it weird that the apparent assassination of the cold open is never brought up?

As surely as Derrickson must eventually close the gap between his deadly lovebirds, so must he plunge us into that ominous ravine. What’s going on down there won’t blow too many minds, but it might get some pulses racing. The Gorge borrows freely from the creepier and crawlier portions of King Kong, and from the shimmering unease of Annihilation. You might be reminded, too, of itchy-tasty survival horror when Levi and Drasa take a break from fleeing and shooting to spool up a reel of convenient laboratory exposition. It’s all a tad conventional after the more novel genre play of the first hour, but Derrickson handles the mayhem with the steady hand you’d expect from a filmmaker with both superhero spectacles and supernatural thrillers on his resume. The poisoned air supply, shifting the color tint every few minutes, is a nifty touch. So, naturally, is the latest score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, slumming it in style with rock chords and eerie sirens – the right soundtrack for this war of the worlds.

The Gorge isn’t some sumptuous new classic of the genre. What’s clever about the movie is mostly in the limitations – of speech and contact and visibility of threat – it eventually abandons. But the gnashing thrills are handsomely, coherently delivered, with the kind of elaborate effects Hollywood once reserved for attractions coming first to a theater near you. It should be possible to experience its pleasures and missteps, both modest, on a screen that can’t fit in your living room. As it stands, The Gorge’s best shot at an audience is autoplay; it’s sure to pull in people who forget to turn their TV off after Severance.