Director – Scott Derrickson, Screenplay – Zach Dean, Producers – C. Robert Cargill, Sherryl Clark, Zach Dean, Scott Derrickson, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Gregory Goodman, Don Granger & Adam Kolbrenner, Photography – Dan Laustsen, Music – Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, Visual Effects Supervisor – Erik Nordby, Visual Effects – AB Visual Effects, Bot Visual Effects, DNeg (Supervisors – Anelia Asparuhova & Sebastian Van Overheidt), DNeg Art, Framestore (Supervisors – Peter Dionne, Jonathan Fawkner & Joad Sita), Host Visual Effects (Supervisor – Joss Flores), Image Engine Design Inc. (Supervisor – Christian Irles), Outpost Visual Effects (Supervisor – Remi Martin), Rebel Unit (Supervisor – Theo Flo-Groeneboom) & The Third Floor, Special Effects Supervisor – Alistair Williams, Prosthetics & Creature Effects Designer – David White, Production Design – Rick Heinrichs. Production Company – Skydance/Crooked Highway.
Cast
Miles Teller (Levi Kane), Anya Taylor-Joy (Drasa), Sigourney Weaver (Bartholomew), Sope Dirisu (J.D.), William Huston (Erikas)
Plot
Levi Kane, a sniper working as private contractor, is hired by a high-level government agent for a twelve-month assignment. He is parachuted in to a remote gorge in an undisclosed location. On either side of the gorge is a guard tower, one side operated by the Americans, the other by the Russians, by an agreement that goes back to the 1940s. The towers are outfitted with heavy artillery and the gorge mined and fenced off against what lurks down below. His departing predecessor will only refer to the inhabitants of the gorge as the Hollow Men. Levi has orders not to communicate with the other side. However, his counterpart, the Lithuanian sniper Drasa, breaks this and begins by holding up signs and he responds. Soon the two are communicating regularly. When Drasa, overcome by sadness, wishes that he could be there, Levi fires a zipline across the gorge and goes to join her. As the two become lovers, they must face the threat of what lurks down in the gorge and its trying to gain access to the surface.
Scott Derrickson has become a major genre contributor since the early 2000s. Derrickson first appeared as director of Hellraiser: Inferno (2000) and around the same time as screenwriter of Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000). Derrickson’s name then began to rise with The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), which begat the spate of exorcism films that makes claims to be based on real-life. Derrickson went on to make the derided remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), the Blumhouse film Sinister (2012), another true-life possession film Deliver Us From Evil (2014), The MCU’s Doctor Strange (2016), the Joe Hill adaptation The Black Phone (2021) and the Dreamkill episode of V/H/S/85 (2023). In between these, Derrickson has also produced the Christian horror film The Visitation (2006), Kirsty (2014), Sinister 2 (2015) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), as well as wrote/produced Devil’s Knot (2013) based on true story of the West Memphis Three.
The script for The Gorge comes from Zach Dean, the writer of Deadfall (2012), 24 Hours to Live (2017) and The Tomorrow War (2021), as well as the stories for Fast X (2023) and Fast XI (2026), plus a number of other high-profile screenplays currently in production.
The script for The Gorge ranked highly on the Blacklist before being bought up by Skydance.You can understand why. It comes with one of the best set-ups I have seen in a film in a long time. We get parallel introductions of Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy’s snipers. These scenes are quick and to the point – establishing who they are, the efficacy of their skillsets and the shadowy degree of high-level security being dealt. Then comes the arrival at the gorge where Sope Dirisu delivers all the details about the gorge, the political arrangement and the nature of the Hollow Men. This delivers all the information we need with lean efficiency and no excess of fat in the writing. It creates something wonderfully forbidding and ominous – I kept getting vibes of something akin to The Keep (1983).
Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy – love across the divide
I have begun to be impressed more and more with everything I see Miles Teller since tv’s The Offer (2022). He has grown out of being a teen actor to someone in full confidence of his facilities, playing with charm and polish. Anya Taylor-Joy is very much an It Girl of the moment. I am not fully convinced she is believable as a world-class sniper, but she plays out the other half of the romantic relationship with wit and flirtatious appeal.
The initial scenes as the two of them connect by a series of signs held up across the gorge looking at the other via binoculars are played with considerable wit by Scott Derrickson. Their relationship becomes the backbone of the film. I kept being reminded of the charming South Korean #Alive (2020) about two people who strike up a relationship across the divide of a street while a zombie apocalypse rages below. It is nice to see a regular romance back on the screen – it has been watered out of mainstream product in recent years as filmmakers try to adjust to new redefinitions of gender identity and norms – and so it is nice to see something returning to a traditional relationship and unapologetic about it.
Zach Dean’s script turns with a series of whiplash twists. No sooner than Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy have started communicating and holding a party across the divide – all while blasting The Ramones out across the gorge – than they are abruptly interrupted by an assault from the Hollow Men, which becomes a full-on defence with heavy-duty artillery. Similarly, the charms of their first in the flesh meeting are abruptly turned on their head by the snapping of Miles Teller’s zipline and plunging him down into the gorge.
(l to r) Miles Teller and Sope Dirisu on the guard tower on the US side of the gorge
The third act of the film is quite a different one from the lead up. The first and second acts are filled with an ominous threat hinted at and a forbidding series of mysterious dictates about the scenario, alongside the development of the relationship between Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy. On the other hand, the last third becomes a Monster Movie with a strong action emphasis as Teller and Taylor-Joy fight their way through the gorge against the mutated shapes that lurk out of the mists. There is the great sense of having travelled over into a borderland zone filled with unearthly creations – zombified creatures that looks part plant that ride on skeletal horses; spider creatures with skulls for bodies; mutated organisms that look like giant plant masses with bodies wound into the midst.
It often feels during many of these scenes that we have stepped inside a shooter videogame watching people progress through various levels of monstrous encounters and blast the crap out of them with an assortment of weapons and appropriated items. Introducing a rational explanation for the monstrosities also ends up reducing much of the fantastic build-up and mystery about this otherworld. You cannot deny that Scott Derrickson gets his grips in and winds up the tension, particularly during the vertical ascent up the cliff-face in a Jeep on a winch cable. In fact, I would go so far as to say that The Gorge is the best of Derrickson’s films to date.
