Director Scott Derrickson (Sinister, Black Phone, Doctor Strange) is an established force in the horror space, but you always hope a filmmaker has aspirations in other genres as well.
Well, clearly he does, because his latest work, The Gorge, covers four or five different genres in the space of a couple hours. From a screenplay by Zach Dean (The Tomorrow War, Fast X), the film begins as something of a military thriller, but it quickly becomes a mystery, science fiction, horror, and even a convincing love story, giving Derrickson a chance to dip his toe in each just long enough to see if he’s any good at it.
We meet Miles Teller’s American mercenary Levi as he goes through a job interview with a high-ranking government agent named Bartholomew (Sigourney Weaver); she seems to want to make sure he’s an unattached, work-focused soldier for some kind of top secret mission, which is exactly what he is. Before long, he’s being masked and flown to a secret location that turns out to be a watchtower on the edge of a deep, foggy gorge—you can’t see the bottom, but if you throw something in it, you hear unholy noises from its depths. Levi is actually replacing another soldier (Sope Dirisu) who has been there a year and quickly gives Levi the rundown of what is expected of him if anything should crawl out of the gorge. There is a massive amount of weapons at his disposal, and he must keep in regular communication with an offsite control center.
Oh, and there’s an identical tower on the other side of the gorge being run by a Russian named Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy). All we know about her is that she’s killed a lot of people as an assassin and has somehow not been too mentally damaged from her work because she comes home to her elderly father after each kill and tells him all about, in something of an unburdening ritual. The two guardians of the gorge are not supposed to talk, but since they’re both young, good looking, and alone, of course they eventually do, with hand-written signs. They compare notes on what they think is in the gorge, which has been under watch going back probably 100 years or more, and eventually they successfully fight off an invasion on both sides, with terrifying creatures called “Hollow Man” crawling up the walls of the gorge. Eventually, all of this communicating and bonding results in Levi and Drasa falling for each other, and he hooks up a pulley across the gorge so he can zip-line himself over to her.
Naturally, this leads to a dance sequence.
To bring director Derrickson more into his comfort zone, eventually the pair end up in the gorge, where they get a better sense of what lives and goes on down there, which I won’t reveal here except to say that the creatures in question are a hybrid of various life forms that shouldn’t be able to blend together. They also discover that all the mist in the gorge is actually making them susceptible to whatever is causing these strange mutations in all the life below.
The two fight their way back to the surface in a series of solid action sequences, with their individual physical and mental limits tested along the way. When Levi’s overseers discover he’s not at his post, they send a small team (including Weaver) out to deal with the situation (and probably kill Levi in the process), but Levi and Drasa have already made the decision to abandon their posts and go into hiding together, if that’s even possible.
The Gorge is too much story and too many tones for one movie, and I say this as someone who loves films that aren’t afraid to tonally shift during their runtime. But this one might be too much for most, even though most of the genre sampling works to some degree. The horror and sci-fi material is the best, but Teller and Taylor-Joy have an undeniable chemistry, and that pulls us through some of the less convincing and interesting moments in the screenplay. A decent, low-level tension permeates the entire film, but nothing especially thrilling or scary takes place, even when I think it’s meant to.
All of that said, my biggest complaint about The Gorge is that it’s not getting a proper theatrical release; the film is beautifully shot, with a few truly large-scale epic visual moments that would only improve in a theater, with a sizable crowd. I’m glad it exists, but you feel short-changed by its presentation.
The film begins streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday, February 14.
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