There’s a lot to recommend The Gorge. For one thing, it’s directed by Scott Derrickson, of Sinister and The Black Phone, and he really knows how to create atmosphere and suspense. For another thing, it has an intriguing premise. Two top-tier snipers – one American, one Russian – are hired to guard the edges of a remote gorge. They’re not protecting it from the outside world but making sure nothing emerges. Their job is containment. The first act of the film follows Levi (Miles Teller) and Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy) as they patrol the West and East Towers, periodically throwing detonators into the foggy chasm, repelling the strange zombie-like creatures that occasionally try to make their way up the rock faces, and keeping an array of creaky technology functioning at the behest of their respective governments.

This first part of the film was the most resonant for me. It’s fully of contemplative moments, clipped dialogue and smoky, granular textures. There’s also a powerful sense of mystery, stemming from Levi and Drasa’s inability to situate the gorge on the world map. The location is cloaked from satellites overhead, invisible on the digital grid, subjected to a No Fly Zone and barred from outside communication. Both operatives are anaesthetized on the flight and then have to trek a considerable distance from the dropoff point. They are also forbidden any digital devices. Perhaps most importantly, they’re forbidden from communicating with each other and so spend the first part of the film simply going about their own business, reconciled to spending their year-long tour of duty without any human contact. Behind the scenes we also learn that all operatives are killed after they depart the gorge.

There’s also an interesting sense of the past in this opening act. Most of the infrastructure around the gorge dates from the early Cold War. Yet this technology feels ancient, closer to the natural world than to the present. Levi and Drasa learn that knowledge of the gorge emerged towards the end of World War II, when three batallions entered it and never returned. Later, when they descend into the gorge, they discover a scientific laboratory that has been taken over by technological equipment dating from the early 2000s. These different timeframes – WWII, Cold War, millennium – jettison the gorge from time as well as space, producing an eerie temporal freefall, a sense that Levi and Drasa have somehow moved outside of time as we conventionally experience it.

All of that paves the way for a somewhat unexpected second act. Once Levi and Drasa start communicating with each other The Gorge shifts abruptly into the realm of romance. Even their first preliminary gestures – holding up messages for each other across the foggy expanse – feel like clips from a music video (they especially recall Taylor Swift’s “Love Story”). All of a sudden, the spatial and temporal dislocation of the gorge turns into a cipher for the modern digital dating market. Like two people on an app, Levi and Drasa are both close and distant, messaging each other across vast distances for an intimacy that is strangely fully-formed by the time that Levi ropes his way across to her side of the chasm. Perhaps the strangest thing about their romance is how basic and broad it is. The moment they make contact The Gorge feels less like an Apple TV+ product and more like a Netflix by-the-numbers romance. There’s also an algorithmic quality to the film from this point onwards, as if it’s trying to hit as many target genres and demographics as possible while maintaining minimal tonal coherence.

In that sense the most resonant parts of The Gorge, at least romantically, are just before Levi and Drasa make physical contact. During this short period, the film exudes a yearning for physical distance, austerity and blockage as a catalyst for romance, in place of the more claustrophobic distance-and-proximity of the digital dating world. It’s a yearning for the paramters of courtly love, in which the couple bond over the length and range of their best sniper shots – that is, precisely over physical distance. This makes physical proximity strange when they first meet in person – their body language is stilted, awkward, tentative, reverting to old-fashioned models of chivalry and submission. This is also when the gorge feels most vital and present, by estranging them from each other’s bodies, and from the bodies of others more generally, it reinvests their romance with a vitality and sensuality that belongs to an older big-screen era. But this quickly gives way to more generic romantic beats, as Miles settles into a jock who writes poetry and Drasa congeals into a bad girl with a gun. 

The film goes downhill (literally) further when Miles and Drasa descend into the gorge. Undoubtedly, there’s a fair amount of suspense here. However, the aesthetic of the film changes radically. In place of the atmospheric naturalism of the opening act we have something closer to a baroque Gustave Dore illustration. Likewise, there’s an almost Lovecraftian sense of descent, as the couple encounter one grotesque and aberrant spectacle after another, all of it shrouded in mist and CGI. Most of this middle act feels like it’s shot against a green screen, giving it the tenor of a video game more than a film. There are still some great horror sequences but they tend to constellate around the fringes of the gorge, as when Levi and Drasa find a way to hitch an abandoned vehicle up the vertical rock walls.

This middle act is also where we find out the story behind the gorge – it was the site of a mid-century biological weaponry laboratory that was disrupted and partially destroyed by an earthquake. The quake unleashed particles that distorted and mutated life, creating a convergence event in which animal, vegetable and fungus DNA started to cross over. In other words, the exact same thing as the “shimmer” in Alex Garland’s Annihilation, which envisages this kind of pan-life force much more effectively. Still, Derrickson is an excellent director and does a good job of evoking this ambient organic texture with its constantly shifting thresholds between life and death. The bottom of the gorge is an ever-evolving membrance between sentience and sapience, with skeleton-like carapaces encrusted on everything, a bit like the original spacecraft in Alien. At times these spliced species verge on pure camp, as with an army of skull bugs that chase down the couple in an abandoned church.   

By the time that Levi and Drasa escape the gorge, they have figured out that it was not a government agency that hired them, but a private contractor using the biological event as a site of future weapons testing. Specifically, Levi’s contact Bartholomew, played by Sigourney Weaver, turns out to be the CEO of this bioweapons corporation, in a nice inversion of her role in Aliens. Her company’s job: using the convergence event of the gorge to build supersoldiers. There’s something genuinely terrifying about her blithe excuse for her actions – “The private sector is where the most important scientific research happens these days” – not least because of how eerily it pre-empts Elon Musk’s infamous “Fork in the Road” email to US federal workers, in which he encouraged them to seek out better opportunities in the private sphere. I just wish the final act of the film, and the showdown between Levi, Drasa and Bartholomew, had a bit more room to breathe. Perhaps The Gorge would have worked better as a series. That would have given its compressed chapters time to breathe, especially with different directors assigned to draw out their different (and often dissonant) styles.