Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge (Apple TV+) is a movie that wants to bridge the distance between characters as well as genres. It’s a meet-cute romantic comedy trying to hold hands with a sci-fi action thriller, and its reach exceeds its grasp.

 

Our protagonists are a pair of his-and-hers mercenaries, Levi (Miles Teller) and Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), stationed separately in guard towers that have been erected on either side of a gigantic and mysterious fissure in the middle of nowhere. The towers have apparently been there since the end of the Second World War, as have the instructions on how to use and maintain them. The occupants are selected according to the quality of their marksmanship and rotated in and out on an annual basis; the only people who know why are of a considerably higher pay grade.

 

Levi and Drasa are not supposed to interact, but over time, their curiosity — and their hormones — get the better of them. What begins as a process of simply keeping tabs blossoms into a full-on flirtation. They communicate via handwritten messages, blast their favourite records, and make eyes at each other through high-powered binoculars. Levi starts thinking about putting up a zip line. Their interactions are a way of staving off loneliness, as well as a necessary distraction from the job at hand, which is to keep one finger on their triggers at all times, and to prevent whatever is living at the bottom of the gorge from crawling out.

 

This is, if nothing else, an original premise, and the fablelike qualities of the set-up are promising. There’s also something morbidly funny about the characters’ mutual attraction: what seems to turn Levi and Drasa on, more than anything, is the possibility that they’ve stumbled across a soulmate with whom they can compare (literal) body counts.

A movie with more wit — or guts — would have played the situation for satire, but The Gorge is only concerned with making Levi and Drasa as adorable and sympathetic as possible. We’re reminded, over and over, that the people they’ve been paid to kill in the past were all bad guys. Levi has bad dreams about the murders he’s committed and even writes poems about them. Drasa, whose fixer happens to be her father, is prone to bouts of melancholy and longs for the innocence she felt as a little girl. And so on.

 

There is no ambivalence, however, about what’s lurking in the gorge. Levi’s predecessor speculates that the hole could be the gateway to hell if only that were the case. The explanations about what’s going on down there and why are disappointing: the more we know, the less the movie is able to trade on a sense of existential dread.

 

Derrickson (Sinister, The Black Phone) has a decent track record as a horror director, but the jolts here are rote. The monsters are weightless visual effects creations with design elements that seem lifted from Alex Garland’s Annihilation, a movie that did a much better job of filtering pulp through metaphysics.

 

Teller and Taylor-Joy are charming and charismatic movie stars, but they’re handcuffed by the contrivances of the material. The Gorge is all contrivances, and its message about the need to smash systems of corporate surveillance and manipulation is pretty hard to take in the context of such a slick and disposable piece of product.

 

Boluwatife Adesina
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Boluwatife Adesina is a media writer and the helmer of the Downtown Review page. He’s probably in a cinema near you.