The Gorge (2025)
a review by Evan Landon
What irritates me the most about certain movies is how they get a huge budget for their screenplays, but care almost nothing for their storytelling. That could be an issue with every movie, but The Gorge truly suffers for other reasons.
Stars Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller continue to both baffle and impress me with their choices of projects they have been picking as of late. Teller has been making subtle waves since the Divergent series, then capturing a lot of attention as Goose's son, Rooster, in 2022's Top Gun: Maverick. Taylor-Joy has always had a closer place in my heart for her turns in The Witch, The Menu, The Queen's Gambit, and Furiosa, but I feel like her talents are completely wasted in this outing.
To be perfectly honest, The Gorge feels like a passion project more than a cash grab, so I do respect it on that level. That being said, is it a movie that is interesting? What The Gorge engages in is almost a writer/director/producer not knowing how to tell a love story, yet masks it in the background of zombie-ish warfare. Two snipers who fall in love in the face of mutated zombies does sound kind of heartwarming and romantic, right? I have strange tastes.
The plot is pretty ridiculous, so if you are not fond of how wacky this premise is, you will absolutely hate this movie. The story follows an ex-marine sniper named Levi (Miles Teller) and Lithuanian sharpshooter, Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), who are both tasked with containing whatever evil resides at the bottom of a gorge from two separate sides; Levi on the west side of the chasm and Drasa on the east side.
Throughout the course of six months, the two begin to form a friendship even though they were instructed never to communicate. After a series of attacks from the mutated, zombie-like creatures residing at the bottom, Levi fashions a rope to cross over to Drasa. Their friendship quickly shifts from strangers, then to comrades, and ultimately lovers. When the rope breaks on his way back across, Levi crashes to the misty grounds at the bottom of the chasm. Having just made love, Drasa parachutes down to save him from certain death. Now, the two must make their way back to the top of the gorge, all the while struggling to survive the treacherous inhabitants of the canyon floor.
The story by writer Zach Dean is no doubt a romance in a world straight out of a horror novel, which is no doubt a pretty exciting setting. The major problems with the script is not the only thing that fails in The Gorge, however. To become fully invested in either of these characters, one has to suspend disbelief from the very beginning and that could be a chore in itself. The dialogue is clunky and there are multiple plot holes that are so big that you could compare them to the gorge itself, leaving it up to the charm of these two characters to truly resonate with the audience. In some ways, it does, but there really is no chemistry between the two, so if you are already buying in to the world that has been built for you, it should not be too difficult to surmise.
Journeyman director Scott Derrickson is able to make some semblance of danger to convey, but is undone when the CGI mutants are just goofy enough to be in a SyFy channel movie. There is some decent action scenes, if you can get past that, but those creatures were just too fake for me to overlook. There is multiple cringe scenes where they come up with the dumbest ways to shoehorn in songs you know Derrickson thought would be bad ass. In turn, it is hilarious in all the ways it attempts not to be.
In the end, The Gorge is an exciting, romantic action flick that is a lot more fun if you turn your brain off. It boasts a great premise with an equally great cast, but it does not stick the landing. There are also multiple cringe scenes that are shoehorned in so hard that it feels like any song that truly spoke to the director allows a slew of montages on so many different, superfluous occasions.
Anya Taylor-Joy continues to be a saving grace in every film she is in though. Falling in love with her might be the most believable part of any movie.
2.5 Out Of 5