Anya Taylor-Joy stars in The Gorge, which is premiering Feb. 14 on Apple TV+.Laura Radford/Apple TV+
- The Gorge
- Directed by Scott Derrickson
- Written by Zach Dean
- Starring Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy and Sigourney Weaver
- Classification N/A; 120 minutes
- Streaming on Apple TV+ starting Feb. 14
A Valentine’s Day flick set at the gates of Hell, the new high-concept thriller The Gorge is half a smouldering romance, half a zombified venture into overkilled horror-movie tropes. In other words: Let’s hope that the respective Romeo or Juliet in your life has something more than an Apple TV+ subscription up their sleeve this Feb. 14.
Like many romantic relationships, The Gorge starts off cute and compelling before turning into something familiar and stultifying. In Eastern Europe, the sexy sniper Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy, her eyes as big as her accent is broad) has just completed another high-risk mission. Yet she is growing weary of her life in the murder-for-hire game, which necessitates an aversion to long-term relationships. Meanwhile, in America, the equally sexy sniper Levi (Miles Teller) is having recurring nightmares about his work in the field, and seems unable to form a connection with anyone but random dogs. Will these two crazy killer kids ever find love?
Well, perhaps a shared super-secret mission will substitute for a meet cute. And so, Levi is recruited by a shadowy Washington power player (Sigourney Weaver) and Drasa by her KBG-adjacent father (William Houston) to travel to a confidential location where they will each stand guard on either side of a deep, fog-filled gorge. Levi will be stationed in the west tower, Drasa on the east, with the length of a football field separating the two.
What exactly are they watching for? Why are their towers so heavily armed? And what could possibly be in that gorge to get America and Russia to co-operate? Well, those are the allegedly great secrets of The Gorge, as well as the film’s greatest disappointments.
For the movie’s first half-hour, Levi and Drasa engage in a rather charming and nearly dialogue-free game of long-distance flirting: She writes down messages on sheets of paper for him to spy on with his high-tech binoculars, and he does the same. This game of old-school texting evolves into chess matches, dance-offs, and other ritualistic acts of loner-meets-loner courtship. It’s mostly cheesy stuff, but Taylor-Joy and Teller sell the shtick exceptionally well, the pair creating chemistry without sharing the same physical space. By the time that Levi concocts a daredevilish way to actually visit Drasa’s tower, you might be turning to your own significant other and wondering whether they would go to one-10th of the trouble.
Yet the romance dies on the vine (or grappling-hook rope) once the film sends Levi and Drasa into the gorge itself. While the pair aimlessly wander around a landscape that feels like director Scott Derrickson typed “H.R. Giger meets H.P. Lovecraft” into Open AI’s image-generator tool, the script by Zach Dean gets similarly lost in a mess of goopy nonsense. The truth of the gorge might not be so hard to swallow, though, had the story’s ultimate revelation not totally rendered the film’s original geopolitical conceit of East and West co-operation nonsensical. (Watch it if you must, then come back to me and we can discuss the ending properly.)
Once Levi and Drasa finally get face time with one another, the performers’ well-matched charms are genuine enough to almost remind you of why anyone would build such a deeply silly movie around them. But ultimately The Gorge is a date-movie that rudely insists on going Dutch. Best to just ghost this would-be suitor and keep swiping right through the Apple TV+ queue.
