REVIEW: The Gorge [2025]

Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 127 minutes
Release Date: February 14th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Apple TV+
Director(s): Scott Derrickson
Writer(s): Zach Dean

Too much truth puts sadness in your heart and madness in your mind.

The life of a long-distance snipers freelancing as assassins is a solitary one. No time to start a family when each job demands extensive chunks of your life. No time to escape the nightmares that gradually chip away at your steely resolve. Thankfully for Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), she doesn’t have to worry about the latter because her ex-KGB father lets her tell him her secrets so as not have to hold onto them alone. Sadly for Levi (Miles Teller), he doesn’t have to worry about the former because the PTSD won’t allow him any attachments anyway. So, why not both accept a year-long mission shrouded in mystery?

Written by Zach Dean and directed by Scott Derrickson, The Gorge follows the exploits of these two characters stranded on either side of an unknown chasm by their respective governments. The assumption is that they are to kill someone from an extreme distance to cover their employer’s butts like usual. But when Levi arrives to relieve his predecessor (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù’s J.D.), the assignment given is a babysitting gig. Sit in a tower, patrol the parameter, radio home every thirty days. Only when J.D. drops a pulse grenade into the mist below are the horrors at-hand revealed. Yes, Levi must simply protect his territory, but not from a potential threat. The monsters beneath his perch are inevitable.

While we catch a glimpse of these “hollow men” to set the stakes, the first hour is hardly action-packed (or tense beyond one effective jump scare). Those sixty-minutes instead portray burgeoning romance on behalf of two lonely souls deciding months of isolation were enough. Written banter seen across the gorge via impossibly crisp zoom binoculars (him on the west side operated by the western world—US and UK—and she on the east side—Russia) evolves into synchronized patrols to flirt and work simultaneously. Eventually, they’ll figure out a way to be together. And as is often the case when a moment of bliss interrupts a nightmare, that calm will be very short lived.

It must considering there’s another hour to go and still no real excitement beyond shooting fish in a barrel. We need Levi and Drasa to get into that no man’s land and see what’s really happening. Answer the questions of who Sigourney Weaver works for and what happened to the original battalions of 1940s soldiers who went down and never returned. We’ll get a ton of CGI foes looking like Davy Jones’ men from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, an impossibly overgrown-by-bone ghost town, and a conspiracy doing its best to render this affair plausible in the scope of World War II destruction and Cold War espionage. Sooner or later too, Levi and Drasa will be forced to choose the mission or each other.

The romance angle works better than the action in my eye, although I wouldn’t say either half is especially trendsetting in its ideas or execution. A generic love story against an oddly dark backdrop versus a generic survival chase amidst an intriguing if underused mythology of creatures (their origin really just helped explain their aesthetic and got me wanting to re-watch Annihilation). The effects work is decent—the darkness and fog do a lot to make it look better than it is considering moments of clear vision leave a bit to be desired. The pacing is effective—two hours is definitely too long, but it never dragged. And Teller and Taylor-Joy’s performances are the perfect mix of hoo-rah determination and sweet humanity.

My biggest gripe is the ending since so many things occur to make it feel like the tension will finally ratchet up. We’re dealing with the fallout of knowing what this place is. The threat of their superiors knowing they know. The uncertainty that Levi and Drasa may be killed by what they saw even if they escape it. And the knowledge that any hope for a future demands running. I actually got excited to see Dean and Derrickson go to town making each of those shoes drop to devastating effect only to ultimately receive … nothing. It’s almost like they ran out of money and decided to simply tie all those loose ends with the same rose-colored saccharine bow. If the rest were better than just “fine,” that letdown probably would have hurt more. As is, The Gorge simply remains fine.