‘The Gorge’ Is a Meet-Cute With Monsters
Somewhere, deep in the forests of an undisclosed location in Europe, there is a valley. The existence of this no-man’s land is a secret known to those with only the highest security clearances. Shrouded in fog and buffeted by steep walls of rock, it is considered one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Towers sit high atop the cliffs on both sides of the canyon, facing each other. One houses black-ops military personnel from the West, the other from from the East. For decades, two lone soldiers have been tasked with guarding this region. When one tenure ends, a new one begins, and fresh blood is rotated in. The mission is not to keep folks from entering the alleged wasteland that lies beneath the mist. It’s to keep whatever is down there from coming out.
This is the briefing that an ex-Marine sniper named Levi (Miles Teller) is given when he’s summoned for a meeting with a “high-level spook” (Sigourney Weaver) for an off-the-books gig. He’s an independent contractor since he’s been out of the Corps, and his reputation as a world-class sharpshooter precedes him. She wants to hire him for West Tower duty. Upon being dropped in the middle of nowhere, he hikes to his new home in the hills of … let’s call it “Redactedistan.” Levi is given the lowdown by his predecessor (Sope Disiru), and told he must essentially follow three rules: Don’t go down in the gorge. Blast whatever tries to crawl, slither or fly up to the top. And for God’s sake, do not communicate with your counterpart across the chasm!
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As for his fellow sniper from the East? She’s Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), an equally hardened gun-for-hire from Lithuania who’s laying low after completing a high-profile assassination. Of course she will attract the attention and pique the curiosity of Levi, and vice versa. Of course they will bond over mowing down odd-looking humanoids who attempt to scale the cliff walls en masse, the ones previous tower tenants have dubbed “the Hollow Men.” Big shout-out to T.S. Eliot! Of course they will defy direct orders and communicate with each other, as well as mutually grooving out to “Blitzkrieg Bop” on Drasa’s birthday, Twisted Sister’s cover of “O Come All Ye Faithful” on Christmas, and their own drum solos on pots and pans during the non-holidays. Of course they will fall in love. And of course they will both end up at the bottom of the gorge, unraveling the mystery of what, exactly, is going on down there.
An extended rom-com meet-cute that just happens to have monsters lurking about, The Gorge works best when its just the two leads staring at each through binoculars, bantering via sketch-pad scrawlings and letting their flirtations organically morph into something more intimate. Which is admittedly unexpected, given who’s playing the lovelorn professional killers. Teller has always been a throwback type of leading man, affecting an aloofness and a “baby, I don’t care” attitude that pairs well with his Robert Mitchum-esque mug. Stoic suits him.
“Charming,” however, isn’t a word that usually comes to mind when you think back on his roles, and the few times filmmakers have successfully let him play loose — see James Ponsoldt’s 2013 drama The Spectacular Now, still Teller’s finest turn — it’s usually to contrast a sort of inner brokenness. Taylor-Joy, however, is the perfect complement to his updated take on the strong, silent type, and you can see how both the tortured character and the actor start to thaw in her presence. Not even her get-Moose-and-Squirrel accent can temper the chemistry between them.
Once the pair find themselves plummeting from their perches — one on accident, the other in search-and-rescue pursuit — The Gorge switches into something like a run-of-the-mill horror/action flick, and that’s where the problems start. Director Scott Derrickson is an old hand at merging the chilling, the macabre, and the straight-up far-out, regardless of whether it’s sci-fi (that 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still), superhero movies (Doctor Strange), or supernatural shock-and-awe (Sinister). Those initial appearances of “the Hollow Men” could not be more eerie, to be sure. Ditto a few other inventive creepy-crawlies that the film unleashes on its running-and-gunning heroes (two words: skull spiders).
But once you find out what’s really happening, and why this area has been such a well-kept secret, you can feel the oxygen get sucked out of the proceedings with alarming speed. The semi-screwball antics of Teller and Taylor-Joy in tandem get reduced to a lot of running around, dodging explosions, and staring in mock terror at whatever CGI grotesquerie the VFX team have decided to throw on the green screen. It’s a pity, but because for the first half of The Gorge, you find yourself leaning in to see what these resourceful soldiers will do next, how they’ll bridge the literal and figurative gap between them, and how they’ll watch each others back once the chips are down. After the movie reduces them to the equivalent of eight-bit video-game protagonists — Run! Shoot! Repeat! — it digs itself into a hole that it’s either unwilling or simply unable to climb out of.
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