On a Valentine’s Day when studios and streamers are steering clear of traditional romance (gory slasher Heart Eyes, goofy action comedy Love Hurts and dating horror The Dead Thing are among this year’s unconventional offerings), Apple TV’s The Gorge feels weirdly traditional in comparison. In any other year a film about two snipers holding guard over an abyss filled with monsters wouldn’t feel like standard date night fare but there are more traditional romcom beats here than one would expect and ultimately want.
When the film, from The Black Phone and Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson, starts off in genre territory, there’s some low-level fun to be had. The setup has a non-triggering Covid-era feel to it, as Miles Teller’s soldier-for-hire Levi finds himself an unlikely new gig, spending the next year alone in a watchtower. In a brief handover from an underused Sope Dirisu, playing his predecessor, he’s told that the gorge beneath him must be guarded not from those trying to get in but holding strong against whatever might come out. He suggests it’s the gates of hell.
But before we get a chance to find out, very soon into Levi’s 12-month shift, he spots Drasa, his slinky Lithuanian equivalent played by Anya Taylor-Joy, over the gorge. The duties are split up by countries from the east and west, inserting what could have been a neat tension similar to that introduced in last year’s space station-set thriller ISS, but instead … hormones. He’s horny and she’s hot, so the pair start breaking the rules by communicating via adorkably annoying written messages as if they’re characters in an early 2000s Sundance movie. Here’s where the good will of the setup starts to dissipate as the pair risk life and limb for date night, him zip-lining over the gorge so he can eat her homemade rabbit pie as they dreamily stare out into the eerie clouds ahead of them. Predictably, taking a break from keeping watch over some unspecified inferno, along with playing loud music to each other over the mist, is not a good idea and the pair find themselves besieged.
There’s an inevitable set of dim-witted circumstances that soon drops them into the gorge where they find some sub-Annihilation production design and we find that things aren’t exactly what they seem. Well, plot-wise they mostly are, a thinly sketched conspiracy involving Sigourney Weaver’s shadowy recruiter unfolding in exactly the way we expect. The real big reveal is that despite looking like it was based on a video game that your younger brother obsessively plays, The Gorge is in fact an original, or whatever that word means when the plot and aesthetic feel like they’ve been stitched together from so many other films. It plays like a particularly unexciting Resident Evil sequel with the pair trying to outrun some unimpressive twig creatures and remain uninfected while finding out information from point-and-click sources.
Screenwriter Zach Dean, whose credits include The Tomorrow War and Fast X, wildly overestimates our investment in the central romance, bravely centre-staging it despite giving us no reason to root or care for the couple. There could have been something darkly funny about a pair of sociopathic killers getting hot and heavy while bonding over the ruthlessness of their profession but, instead, they’re boringly haunted by it, hoping the other one might save them. Both actors are in full, show-me-the-money autopilot mode, flatly flirting with such lack of passion it feels as if their real-life partners are awkwardly watching off-camera, Taylor-Joy particularly inert as Manic Pixie Dream Sniper.
There are touches of above-average streaming craft here, distancing it from the standard Netflix equivalent – an indistinctive yet solid score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, some grand cinematography from Guillermo del Toro fave Dan Laustsen – but the film bears too much of that synthetic Apple feel, as if it was primarily made to show off the abilities of a new iPhone. Given how so many of the company’s streaming shows and films are barely marketed, The Gorge feels like another one that will easily, and deservedly, disappear into the abyss.
The Gorge is now available on Apple TV
