2025 is gonna go down as one of the strangest Valentine’s Day movie combos for couples. Instead of picking romcom or action/horror/thriller, movie studios just combined the two to save couples from making a choice. Better for stopping arguments, but a mixed bag as entertainment. Apple TV now adds a streamer option with The Gorge, another strange mixture of a film that works more than it doesn’t, thanks to its great leads and a good director who does his best to wrangle the material into a solid entertainment on a cozy Valentine’s at home. With snipers!
2 great shots actually. One is Levi (Miles Teller), an ex Marine turned mercenary, who’s growing weary from his ever growing “confirmed kills” count. The other is Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), a KGB “special consultant” with a dying father (William Houston) and slowly confronting the consequences of her talents on her psyche. Unsurprisingly, the pair agree to station opposite towers on either side of the gorge: a clouded deep drop that neither of them have gotten any intel on but clearly isn’t hiding unicorns and rainbows.
Based on that setup, you’d think The Gorge is just some sci-fi/thriller that’ll have us waiting for Levi and Drasa to drop into its hellscape. But if that’s what you wanted, you’ll have to wait. At first, that pissed me off a little, as I was doing the fireworks factory complaints. Then something really magical happens: Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy turn the movie into the strangest weirdly sweet romcom you’ve ever seen. Their courting is done silently, with that gorge between them and only sniper/binoculars to see what the other is up to. It’s a testament to Teller and Taylor-Joy, that I frankly forgot about that teasing cloud cover because I was so into their “love in a hopeless place” romantic energy. It would have been a bold move to just ignore the movie’s title and just live in cupid’s chokehold between our leads, but The Gorge is shockingly at its best when we can just hang out with Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy perched in towers winkingly reliving past glories with one another.
But Scott Derrickson is the director of this movie for a reason. For couples who won’t know, Derrickson is famous for horror movies like The Black Phone or Sinister. So, at some point, we’re heading down into that hellscape. Strangely, this part of the movie is the least successful, because we have to wrap things up, and we get a lot of “show don’t tell” violations that suck some of the life out of that really great first hour. However, not all is lost. Derrickson’s warped mind has a blast envisioning what the big reveal’s effects might have on the things Levi and Drasa find down there. There are real moments of twisted visuals that will chill many to their core. There’s one scene inside a building that had me sufficiently creeped out. And even though the plot does a lot of telling, Derrickson uses colored hazes to make mood sufficiently unsettling, as our surprising couple tries to escape, before it’s too late. The Gorge’s….rorror? homantic? Ok you can’t really combine horror and romance perfectly, though this one has its fair moments of brilliance threading that tricky genre needle.
After the weirdness of 2025, can we get back to basics next year please? How about Scott Derrickson just makes a cool horror movie, and I don’t know, Celine Song gets a chance at a swoony romantic film. Let’s that couples quarrel back to where it belongs: before the movie starts, instead of after the movie ends. Happy Valentine’s Day…gorge yourself on some good films. I saved it for the end for all of your sakes.