AP – In the movies, we’ve had green valleys, haunted hills and grand canyons. But only now has the time arrived for a long-overshadowed land formation. The Gorge, a preposterous new videogame-like thriller, at least succeeds in gorging on this often-overlooked geological feature.
The gorge in question, to be fair, is a beauty. In some northern forested wilderness sit two concrete towers, one for each side of a wide, foggy ravine encircled by sheer rock steeps. Two expert snipers – Levi (Miles Teller) from the United States, and Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), placed by Russia – have been dropped off to man their respective stations.
Both are conscripts of a sort. Levi has been a private contractor for the military since being psychologically deemed unfit for service by the Marines. Drasa is Lithuanian. Each operates in the murky quasi-official world of covert military operations. All they know is that they’re to be at this ultra-classified post for a year, part of an annual rotation. Their main job is to shoot anything that comes out of the chasm below.
The Gorge, directed by Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange, The Black Phone) from a script by Zach Dean (The Tomorrow War, Fast X), unpeels these mysteries in a film that, if it wanted to, could be a very atmospheric post-Cold War parable, a kind of kaiju-in-the-ground thriller, about deep-buried military secrets.
That may be the backdrop, but The Gorge wants to be something else, too. It wants to be a love story.
Taking after the hybrid DNA horrors that emerge from below, The Gorge mixes rom-com with sci-fi, with mostly ridiculous results.
The production quality is well above the grade of its script, with cinematography by Dan Laustsen and a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. But the tonal swings make The Gorge an intriguing but empty genre mash-up and streaming-only exercise. Like would-be lovers who spy each other across balconies, Drasa and Levi find their gazes trained more on each other than the evil that lurks below.
As the months go by, their interactions advance to dancing and even a dinner date.
You could at this point be asking yourself a few questions. If some version of hell was pried open, would we, perhaps, want more than two guards? But if we’re going with two, how likely is it, with ghoulish things sporadically climbing up from the abyss, that they would soon begin a Love, Actually-style courtship of holding up signs for each other?
These aren’t quibbles that The Gorge has any time for, though. Though the movie’s flow is choppy and occasionally distracted by overly showy camera moves, it zips along and soon enough the two of them are shooting at what you could only call skull spiders. Questionable as the romantic turn is, Taylor-Joy and Teller have convincing chemistry.
Once we get a decent view of the creatures, they appear half tree root, half human, like demon Groots. The Gorge is better before our main characters are no longer poised at the mouth of hell but running through the gorge floor. One minute, they’re swaying to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the next they’re being swallowed by an adhesive root system.
The Gorge is pretty superficial stuff, but perhaps we can await its even shallower sequel, The Gully. – Jake Coyle
