The Gorge (2025) – Review

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I love a good mash up – and by that I mean a movie that throws together so much differing elements into a pot, the steaming, random gumbo that pours forth becomes virtually impossible to classify. Take The Gorge for example; a made for Apple TV movie by The Black Phone’s Scott Derrickson that, amongst other things, manages to be a fantasy/horror/military/sci-fi thriller that also somehow manages to be a love story despite the presence of vicious twiggy monsters and hefty military ordinance.
The fact it’s been released on Valentine’s Day should tell you exactly how prominent the romance is in this movie and yet with so much else going on, can a minimalist cast including Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy and Sigourney Weaver help Derrickson to keep his genre blending monster mash stable enough before everyone and everything in it is absorbed into shapeless mass of screeching creatures, explosions and longing looks?

Deeply depressed elite sniper Levi Kane is one of those “private contracters” who, after years of thudding bullets into remote targets hundreds of miles away, has emerged a sullen, withdrawn emotional wreck plagued with reoccurring nightmares and regret. On the bright side, this means he’s a perfect candidate to be hired for a mysterious mission to guard one side of a massive, misty gorge in an undisclosed location for reasons unknown. After accepting and being flown in to spend a year keeping watch for things unknown, he’s briefed by the man he’s replacing and gets back down to the business of being broody in an isolated location.
However, he’s actually not technically alone as, on the other side of the gorge, is a similar vantage point that’s seemingly run by the Russians and is inhabited by Drasa, a Lithuanian merc who has a similarly grim life story and has been hired for an identical tour of duty keeping an eye on the sinister chasm. However, after months of doing their desolate duty, the two break protocol and start communicating via signs and soon start bonding despite the vast distance between them – but with communication comes the inevitable questions.
What exactly are they there to keep an eye out for? The defences that are arranged around the gorge suggest that it’s not to stop anything getting in, but to stop something from getting out and soon they discover that a malevolent force is lurking in the mist looking to emerge the first chance it gets. But after an attempt by Levi and Drasa to close the physical gap between them succeeds in strengthening their relationship, it also results in both of them take an unwanted, guided tour at the bottom of the gorge. Can these two burgeoning lovers manage to uncover the secrets of these “Hollow Men” that dwell in the depths and escape before their affair ends before it begins.

Scott Derrickson has always managed to inject a sense of the experimental into his populist output. Be it the trippy, unnerving death sequences seen in Sinister to the surreal superheroics of Doctor Strange, he’s always tried to come at his projects from a more original angle than some of his peers and while most directors would treat The Gorge as more sensationalist fare, here the helmer chooses to take a quieter, more indie approach to the standard creature feature shenanigans. Knowing full well that a movie full of mystery inevitably looses a fair fraction of its effectiveness the second you start hurling exposition about, the script wisely keeps things restrained as it can for as long as it can. Using the reclusive life of an elite sniper to establish a very quiet, minimalist tone, the film goes all out to build the central relationship as these two, rifle totting lost souls manage to find each other due to a genuinely engrossing mixture of written signs and playing the Ramones at the loudest level you possibly can. As a result, both Teller and Tayor-Joy are obviously enjoying trying to convey the type of budding relationship that’s seen mostly though binoculars but doesnt require a restraining order and despite its rather serious nature, the flick even has a little fun by referencing the past cinematic talents of oyster leads. But when Taylor-Joy isn’t whupping her companion at chess or Teller isn’t thrashing away on a makeshift drumkit, the film’s dedication to the central relationship serves it in good stead when things get decidedly fucking weird.
Derrickson sets up the mystery with many tantalising questions popping up and starts alarm bells ringing by having Sigourney Weaver hire Teller while she plays the same kind of conniving, power suit wearing honcho she portrayed in the likes in Cabin In The Woods and Chappie. But after it’s spelled out how threatening the situation is with all the lasers, mines and remote controlled guns pointing at the titular crack, we start to get a peek behind the monstrous curtain.

To be fair, if you’ve seen the likes of The Hallow, The Hole In The Ground, The Last Of Us or even the second Pirates Of The Caribbean flick, the malformed, warped and mutated creatures come from same playbook as the waves of body horror afflicted bezerkers. In short order we’re treated to scenes of our leads utilising their sizable resources to thwarting their ascent, but just as you wonder how Derrickson is going to maintain this for the two hour plus runtime, a mid-film shift in tone whips out some real surprises that ends up being somewhat comparable to the lurch from crime film to full blown horror we got in From Dusk Till Dawn.
To spare you any damaging spoilers, we eventually take a trip to the bottom of the gorge only to find that we’ve essentially been suddenly parachuted into a world that seems like a mix of Stephen King’s The Mist and a Frank Frazetta painting and plays like a survival based video game. The next thing you know, we’ve gone from an uber-subtle thriller/romance to watch our leads fend off spiders made out human skulls and the Hollow Men who have become “of the forrest” as they come at them riding horses seemingly formed out of entwined branches. More so than that, this world comes complete with colour coded must that shifts from sickly yellow to deep purple that feels like the Upside Down from Stranger Things is trying out new colour swatches and if the first half of the movie wasn’t so restrained, the second half wouldn’t work nearly as well.

Eventually, we get the inevitable explanations for what is happening and why and while the strangely convenient answers and neat resolutions slightly betray the thoughtful, brooding build up, it’s somewhat refreshing to see such a silly movie played so admirably straight. The continuing thread is, of course, the romance that forms between the two main characters and while the ending might defuse what could been a more tragic romance The Gorge proves to be both admirably deep and shallow when necessary.
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