Posted in: Apple, Kaitlyn Booth, Movies, Review | Tagged: Anya Taylor-Joy, Miles Tellar, scott derrickson, The Gorge

The Gorge Review: A Strange Romance that Outshines the Horror

The Gorge is a strange film that somehow gets worse when the inciting incident happens, and the rest of the plot unfolds.

The Gorge works better as a strange romance than an action film. The actual monsters are far less interesting than the concept of two people forming a friendship through signs and binoculars.

Director: Scott Derrickson
Summary: Two highly-trained operatives become close after being sent to protect opposite sides of a mysterious gorge. When an evil emerges, they must work together to survive what lies within.

The Gorge Falls Apart In The Strangest Of Ways

It's almost strange when the final credits of The Gorge roll and you realize what aspect of this film worked and what didn't because it is likely the opposite of what anyone would expect. The film centers around a bottomless gorge where there are monsters and maybe a portal to hell somewhere in the world, and two people on either side are tasked with keeping everything at bay. When the next shift arrives, we meet Levi (Miles Teller) and Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), two sharpshooters on the western and eastern sides, tasked with keeping watch over everything. They aren't supposed to have contact with each other, and they are left in isolation for a year. However, when the two start to communicate across the gorge via written messages and binoculars, a connection is formed, and for two people with body counts, they are kind of adorable.

The dynamic between Drasa and Levi seems like it would be the weaker element of the film, but it is nearly the sole focus for the first hour, with one brief interlude to show us that the monsters are real. However, it ends up really working. These are two people who fire shots at each other in jest the first time they decide to have a conversation. It's pretty clear that they are both broken in very different ways from the burdens they carry as hired guns, but they're also weirdly dorky at the same time. It's a rom-com by way of two people who could put a bullet through each other's eye at a moment's notice, and it works really well. It works well enough that both the audience and our leads seem to forget how dangerous the gorge is until they are forced to go down.

A Version Of Hell(?) We've Seen Before

From there, we enter a world you might not expect. The film plays fast and loose about what is going on down there, and to say what it is will spoil a massive element of the film. However, the designs of the monsters and the world that is down there may not be what you expect, but they are not poorly designed. The trailer and marketing have done a decent job of hiding what this looks like, which is what it's supposed to do. However, it makes it a bit difficult to criticize without giving away the game too much. If you've ever watched Annihilation, you have a pretty good idea of what you'll see down there.

The problem is, to get into the thing that doesn't work about The Gorge means talking about the gorge itself. Once Levi and Drasa get down there, the movie becomes something we've seen a million times before. We know this story; we've seen this play out, and even the final twist isn't that compelling once it is revealed. This is not to say that the action is bad; both Tellar and Taylor-Joy are believable as soldiers, and they both fight like well-trained people would fight and not superheroes. No one is jumping off of walls or spinning in the air like a comic book movie; they punch and kick and bleed like a person trying to fight a monster would. Director Scott Derrickson does an excellent job of making these fight scenes feel like they could go wrong at the drop of a hat, and both Levi and Drasa are very vulnerable and could die just that fast. The tension is there during these fights, but the problem is that the rest of the movie around them isn't quite there once they end.

The gorge itself is covered in a thick layer of mist but seems to change colors to differentiate the different types of landscapes and areas that we see. In a way, it feels like moving from one level to another in a video game. Okay, we meet the yellow river level; now, we need to move on to the purple field level. We need to make sure we take care of a few monsters, maybe have a mini-boss fight, and move on to the next. This framework helps with all of the "show, don't tell" that is on hand with the gorge.

Or, at least, it does until we get to the part where exposition is dropped, and someone flat-out explains what is going on. We clicked the right button while searching for an item and triggered the cut scene. It's like the longer the movie goes on, the less faith everyone involved has in the audience to figure out what's going on without having to explain it to them. It leads to an ending that feels extremely anti-climatic in a way that cannot be explained without spoiling the order of things, but to say that it's unsatisfying might be the understatement of the century.

The Gorge: When The Inciting Incident Sends Things Downhill

The Gorge is a strange film that somehow gets worse when the inciting incident happens, and the rest of the plot unfolds. This is a romance combined with a horror and action movie, but the horror and action movie elements are the film's weaker aspects. When you've just watched Drasa and Levi courting each other across a gorge that may or may not be an actual Hellmouth, you're having a good time. However, once the monsters start showing up and the movie explains what is happening, the mystery is solved, and the answer isn't revolutionary. Somewhere along the way, wires got crossed, and the latter half of this film kind of fell apart. It's not enough to kneecap the production, but it's certainly not worth signing up for AppleTV+ if you don't already have an account. If you have one? Well, there are worse ways to spend an evening.

The Gorge

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Review by Kaitlyn Booth

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7/10

The Gorge works better as a strange romance than an action film. The actual monsters are far less interesting than the concept of two people forming a friendship through signs and binoculars.

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