The Gorge

The Gorge has a neat premise: Two highly skilled independent contractors have been enlisted to watch over a mysterious narrow valley. Posted in an unknown country on guard towers overlooking the gorge’s deep walls, one contracted soldier represents Western interests, and Moscow hired the other. A thick fog obscures the narrow chasm, about two hundred yards wide. Beneath the fog is an unknowable abyss populated by monsters—half-human, half-plant creatures, like zombified ents. The guards have been tasked with keeping these so-called Hollow Men from escaping, serving as sentinels at the veritable gates of hell. In the meantime, the well-armed contractors, played by Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy, communicate across the vast space using written messages spied with binoculars. Of course, these two good-looking people fall for each other, and the mysterious forces test their mettle beneath the fog. 

However promising its setup, The Gorge is better in concept than execution. This comes as a surprise, given the talent involved. Scott Derrickson, director of Doctor Strange (2016) and The Black Phone (2022), helms this scenario for AppleTV+. The production was shot by Dan Laustsen, cinematographer of the last few gorgeous-looking Guillermo Del Toro pictures. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, known for supplying outstanding scores on everything from Soul (2020) to Challengers (2024), provide the music. But the movie doesn’t take long to reveal its weak link: the screenplay. While watching The Gorge, I made a note that it has the same derivative quality as The Tomorrow War (2021), a hackneyed alien invasion story patched together from other, better movies. Only later did I learn that the same writer, Zach Dean, penned both screenplays. 

For the first half of the movie’s 127-minute runtime, Derrickson allows Teller and Taylor-Joy to build a natural chemistry. Their characters, Levi and Drasa, both have world-renowned reputations as snipers. They’re each given strict instructions not to communicate with the tower on the other side. Sope Dirisu plays Levi’s predecessor, whose exposition dump clarifies most of our questions about how the gorge has been cloaked from satellites. The year-long solo mission requires maintenance of the armaments along walls and gardening to maintain food supplies, though there’s no mention of what they’ll do for food in the winter months. Maybe the canning sequence was cut for time. In any event, after the first attack by the Hollow Men, our heroes realize they need each other, even though they’re not supposed to communicate. How did earlier guardians survive without working together? Regardless, together, they uncover the secret origins of the nightmarish creatures below—and the answers are predictable and yawn-inducing. 

The Gorge shares much in common with staples of horror and science-fiction; each of its ideas has countless antecedents, and it’s not a strong enough movie to overcome its air of familiarity. The story is essentially about two guards assigned to keep the monsters from The Mist (2007) at bay, with traces of Resident Evil-esque survival horror and genetic mutation. Gradually, the obvious inspirations accumulate and become distracting, such as the heads with spider legs straight out of The Thing (1982) and the DNA fusion effect of Annihilation (2018). Still, the movie has its moments, particularly in the first half, where the actors must build their characters with minimal dialogue, and Derrickson directs scenes on purely visual terms. Our heroes are two lone wolves; they bond over their shared skills and, let’s face it, because there aren’t any other options in the middle of nowhere. 

With horror, the unknown is often scarier than the known. And once The Gorge begins to reveal its secrets, after Levi and Drasa enter the valley, the answers prove mostly unsatisfying and often look much worse. The Hollow Men—a reference to T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same name in this curiously poem-centric story—resemble rejected designs of the cursed sailors from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. But the cheapness of studios today and their unwillingness to give SFX companies enough time to render high-quality digital characters means that CGI characters from twenty years ago somehow look better than an A-list production today. And this is a CGI-heavy production, with a considerable amount of footage deploying unconvincing green screen work. In many scenes, Teller and Taylor-Joy seem to be separate from nearly everything else onscreen, leaving the material with no tangibility or weight. 

But any movie with strong enough storytelling can transcend its budgetary and even technical limitations—and that includes excessive bad CGI. The Gorge falls short of that. Much like The Tomorrow War, Dean’s script neither conceals nor manages to surmount its inspirations. Categorized as an adventure-romance with horror elements, the movie didn’t work on any of its levels: I didn’t buy the romance, I didn’t find the CGI monsters scary, and apart from a couple of sequences, the movie didn’t raise my heart rate. The frustrating part is that, despite the underwhelming VFX and unoriginal concept, The Gorge might have worked with better writing and richer characters. That’s true of every bad movie, I suppose. Instead, the script’s weaknesses only accentuate the secondhand aspects of the story and oppressively digital visual treatment.