The Gorge : Movie Review

Two guard towers. Two highly skilled assassins. A vast, mysterious gorge between them. Their assignment? To keep whatever’s in said gorge from rising to the surface. It’s an easy setup for Apple Studios’ The Gorge, starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy as people hired for their “particular set of skills.” A lively sci-fi/action/horror film with a serious spark, The Gorge is enjoyable to its closing credits and a nifty exercise in tension.

Zach Dean’s 2020 Black List screenplay is a tightly wound scorcher, knowing exactly when to pay out information, let things sit, or tease us. There’s a lot of teasing going on in the film’s first act, especially where we see sniper Drasa (Taylor-Joy) drop her target from quite a substantial distance. Disciplined in her movements and manner, we want to know more about this woman who’s hidden herself with an elaborate setup – God knows how long she’s been in her blind – and just completed her task efficiently and without hesitation. While we get to know Drasa over the course of the movie, it’s this introduction that stands us on her knife’s edge; she’s cunning and, most importantly, capable.

Opposite her, we meet four years-retired Marine Levi (Teller) as he wakes up in a cold sweat and tries to calm the storms in his mind with a nighttime trip to the beach, where he sits alone until sunrise. Converse to how we’re dropped into Drasa’s life, we’re told about more than shown his talents when he’s taken before a stern-looking woman (Sigourney Weaver) who prods him with questions. About his service, his record, his retirement, or any attachments – he answers all of these calmly and resignedly, claiming “there aren’t a lot of reasons” for him anymore. Levi’s still in command of the keen senses that have kept him alive thus far (and put others in the ground) – enough to guess that she’s got more authority than she’s letting on and more than enough to be recruited into her program.

These interest-piquing introductions also let us know where to place our expectations of Teller and Taylor-Joy, both of whom put forth well-worn performances that root us in this world and help us believe in it. As Drasa’s been recruited to the same post on the other side of the titular gorge (with contact between them forbidden by their betters), we get to see Taylor-Joy and Teller define their characters physically, engaging with the terrain and methodically checking the many devices and protection measures. We get the feeling that they’re both proving themselves to not just each other but to themselves as they settle into a remote, electronically cloaked location for a year’s overwatch.

Drawing us into their circles bit by bit forces our want to know more about them, and director Scott Derrickson makes us earn the knowledge of what awaits them below their positions. So, too, do Levi and Drasa earn their knowledge of each other, keeping to their respective sides before a birthday celebration leads to balcony conversations and chess games – with everything being written on whiteboards and pads of paper and seen through their binoculars. It’s almost a beat-for-beat callback to a similar scene in Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, but it’s no less enjoyable. Seeing Levi and Drasa’s forbidden friendship evolve across the chasm is one of the highlights of this movie, and it gets even better when Levi accidentally falls into the gorge and Drasa follows.

There are only some two to four minutes of the narrative that take place away from Levi and Drasa; Derrickson wisely chooses to save these moments for horrible punches that we must take on our heroes’ behalf. Our perception of this yearlong assignment is irreversibly colored early on with one of these moments, sinisterly turning from being a story about humanity’s last line of defense to a tale about power and the actions needed to keep it. Multitudes could be said about the forced divide between people who are only trying to do the right things and are treated as playthings for someone’s whims, but the real story – which rounds out this film’s metaphors – is revealed in what’s at the bottom of the gorge. It’s not done in a way that beats you over the head, but there’s a slyly disturbing truth in what Dean’s script has to say about the powerful turning people against one other, even though it seems like a typical sci-fi reveal.

Scott Derrickson guides us wisely between gallows humor and horror by retaining a humanity that Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy hold in their beings as talismans, passing that energy onto their characters. An elevated camaraderie is felt between these two professionals – “game recognizes game,” as the saying goes – and it’s fun being let in on it. Although it sometimes wears its influences on its sleeve (the final scene is awfully close to a certain 2002 “dead guy comes back to life” movie), The Gorge is terrific, asking us to hang out with two people with nothing to lose who suddenly find everything in each other.