A new film on Apple TV+ is called The Gorge, but it’s not because “Gorge” is short for “gorgeous.” Like too many streaming movies today, it looks like crap. As is becoming the standard, The Gorge has a couple of very good-looking people—Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy—as leads, but its visual style is so underlit and ugly that we can barely see their faces much of the time (and the less said about Taylor-Joy’s attempt at a Lithuanian accent, the better).
Based on a Black List-listed script by Zach Dean and directed by Scott Derrickson, The Gorge has a premise that starts as intriguing but becomes progressively more silly once we discover what’s really going on and discover even later what’s really going on. The premise is that there’s a mysterious gorge located in an undisclosed location at the ends of the earth. An American sniper (Teller) and a Lithuanian one (Taylor-Joy) have been assigned to patrol either side of it, although neither of them has been told what’s in the gorge or why they’re assigned to protect it.
The two communicate by holding up signs and eventually develop an inevitable flirtation, facilitated by a sophisticated zipline system that goes over the gorge. Teller recites T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” and feels the need to explain it, as if she hasn’t seen Interstellar.
I won’t reveal what’s at the bottom of the gorge—this is one of those movies where if you look up what genre it is, that’s a spoiler—but nothing that emerges is especially interesting, at least before the film pivots into the third act into more of a generic conspiracy thriller that borrows several elements from Avatar, including one of the same actors. There are many genres at play here, but the film isn’t adept at juggling them.
Scott Derrickson directed horror-tinged thrillers The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Sinister earlier in his career, before making the first Doctor Strange movie for Marvel (that was the good one, not the lackluster sequel), and later the unpleasant child-stalking horror movie The Black Phone, for which he’s got a sequel lined up later this year. Dean, the screenwriter, wrote 2021’s The Tomorrow War, which was also a forgettable streaming star vehicle, that time with Chris Pratt on Prime Video and the underwhelming most recent Fast and the Furious movie, Fast X.