THE GORGE is a movie with an appealing, simple premise, strong execution, great tone, and a fun mix of elements you don’t usually see together but that feel perfectly natural. It’s a romance within a monster movie, or vice versa, but not in a a jokey way at all (though that worked for LOVE AND MONSTERS). It’s funny because its two main characters know how to make each other laugh, but its outlandish situation is taken seriously.
It’s also a movie star movie, as most good romances are, with its two leads reaching new levels of onscreen charisma, though for some reason Apple made this for the small screen only. I guess that’s none of my business.
It’s partly an action movie. Lithuanian sniper Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy, THE WITCH, THE NORTHMAN, THE MENU, THE FURIOSA) is introduced hiding out in a cave before, on day 4, a private jet lands and she headshots some oligarch the second he steps off. (That would’ve been a funny cameo for Matt Damon or somebody.) She goes to a cemetery to catch up with her loving ex-KGB dad (William Houston, CLASH OF THE TITANS), who’s not long for this world, so this is goodbye forever because she took a job where she has to go dark for at least a year. So does Levi Kane (Miles Teller, ONLY THE BRAVE), a decorated American soldier, declared psychologically unfit for Navy jobs, still a mercenary, and alone enough to take this weird, mysterious gig where he’s not even allowed to know what country he’s in.
They drop him off and he hikes to the spot, met by the guy he’s replacing (Sope Dirisu, HIS HOUSE), who shows him the ropes before departing. Levi will live in a cement watch tower/cabin built generations ago, maintaining the turrets and cloakers and landmines on the gorge. The eastern countries provide a watcher on the other side, who he is not allowed to contact. Oh and there’s something in the gorge called “hollow men” and he has to make damn sure they don’t get out and if they do he’ll hear an air raid siren and he better get the fuck out of there. Okay, see ya.
I like these kind of scenarios partly because I wonder how I would manage. When you don’t actually have to do it, something seems attractive about a job like this, the idea of getting paid for a year of solitude in a little cabin, not having to worry about the usual stuff. Seems peaceful. There’s a garden and a book shelf (no DVD collection somehow), and this guy writes poems every day (he knew “hollow men” was a T.S. Eliot reference). Also he’s left with the equipment and proprietary recipe for a potato vodka that’s apparently pretty top notch. Over on Drasa’s side she has a portable speaker and a record collection, which I think I would need too. I wonder if she got to bring some of her own? I think she did. A rare instance of colored vinyl in a movie.
Of course I’d probly get lonely real quick. That’s what happens with Drasa, who a couple weeks in starts holding up signs to talk to Levi. He tells her they’re not supposed to have contact, she says it’s her birthday and she’ll do what she wants. They go back and forth writing messages to each other or doing funny things, watching each other through binoculars. Over time they find different creative ways to have fun together from a distance (while also nodding to their roles in WHIPLASH and The Queen’s Gambit).
It’s like the way they communicated from the rooftops in the remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD, except it’s these two very attractive, very alone people, so it’s flirtatious. I think the fact that they’re hitting it off so well without even hearing each other’s voices, with this literal distance and chasm separating them, but while watching each other intently waiting for signals, makes it somehow strangely intimate.
Man, this really could’ve gone another way, though. He could’ve been some gross pervert who gave her bad vibes and she has to just hang blankets over all her windows and watch the gorge through little slits. I’m glad it worked out better than that.
Later than you would expect, but somehow seemingly out of the blue, Drasa points down because she realizes that her blasting of the Ramones has attracted some weird tree root monster dudes who are scrambling up the wall, some of them setting off mines, but not all of them. So Drasa and Levi get the guns and light those things up and you can imagine how people of their sniper lifestyles would be impressed by each others’ skills there.
I’ll leave alone how exactly things escalate, except to say that they end up fighting monsters side by side, and discovering what exactly is up with the gorge. It’s not what I assumed, and it’s got a bit of that video game feel where they’re finding abandoned stations and determining what happened there long ago, but the information comes across fairly economically. Crucially, the monsters are strange and cool looking – too CGI weightless in some spots, but I don’t mind too much. I enjoyed the bizarre bugs and carnivorous plants and one particularly crazy sight gave me that satisfying laugh that comes from something being absurd but awesome.
There’s also an appropriate suspicion of militarism, especially private military companies. And I like the dreamy yellow (or occasionally blue) haze of the gorge. It’s a strange place, reminded me a little of THE MIST, more of ANNIHILATION, but with its own look. It made sense when I saw on the credits that the d.p. is Dan Laustsen (SILENT HILL, JOHN WICK 2, 3 and 4, NIGHTMARE ALLEY) and the production designer is Rick Heinrichs (FARGO, SLEEPY HOLLOW, DARK SHADOWS, THE LAST JEDI). You hire those guys if you care about your movie looking great.
Maybe I’m a softy in middle age, but I really liked that it works completely as a monster movie but ultimately proves that it was serious about the love story. The end is not about a demonic claw climbing out of a pit, it’s about resolving the love story. It expects that’s what you’ll care about most, and in my case they’re right. They should do a THE GORGE PART II where the gorge is only a metaphorical obstacle in their relationship that fortunately they work through while doing normal jobs in a world of normal non-tree people.
Speaking of metaphorical, there are definitely different ways to think of this gorge and the freaky dudes it contains. It’s the secret horrors of war, the dead soldiers, the evil technologies, the environmental catastrophe; memories civilization wants left in the past, despite their continuing threat. I’m not really sure how to connect that to the larger love story, but that’s okay. Sorry, it turns out I’m an easy mark for Anya Taylor-Joy with dark hair and black outfits, collecting vinyl and being willing to jump blindly into a pit and fight monsters for love. I wouldn’t have guessed that would happen, but director Scott Derickson (THE BLACK PHONE, DOCTOR STRANGE) obviously knew what he was doing.
Though produced by Ain’t It Cool veteran/Derrickson writing partner C. Robert Cargill, the script is credited solely to Zach Dean (24 HOURS TO LIVE, FAST X). It’s not based on anything, but feels to me like it could be from a cool short story or novella. That’s a compliment – a good hook, told concisely, with strong characters. Humble but slickly produced. Also Sigourney Weaver is in it and the score is by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM). If you have access to Apple+ and don’t care about/have already seen the Ted Lasso guy I definitely recommend abseiling into THE GORGE.
March 3rd, 2025 at 9:10 am
Ms. Taylor-Joy is a Lithuanian sniper? I’m guessing by this point someone has informed her that a rifle scope isn’t a telelscope and treating it as such (by placing one’s eye against it when looking through) is… painful.
(she does this multiple times in Furiosa. Since Pavlovian conditioning forces me to yell “Never do that!” when I see this being done, I wasn’t the most popular person in the theater)