The Gorge Review: How Far Does Your Love Travel?
Scott Derrickson’s latest is a slight but welcome retreat into a bygone era of YA-inspired genre mashing.
Film: The Gorge. Year: 2025. Genre: Action/Sci-fi/Romance. Rating: PG-13. Director: Scott Derrickson.
The Zone. The Shimmer. The Gorge. Mapping the lineage of mysterious geographical anomalies in stories leaves a mountain of proposed metaphors on what films like Stalker (1979) and Annihilation (2018) reveal about the human condition: , desire, , memory and . The Gorge, the latest entry in the niche genre of ‘Zone-based sci-fi,’ is far less interested in those philosophical matters of the mind, instead opting to probe affairs of the heart. The major reveal is not what or who’s behind the titular chasm’s mystery but that the film shares more in common with The Hunger Games series than Tarkovsky’s classic. Simply, The Gorge (2025) reads like The Gorge (2015).
Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy star as Levi Kane and Drasa, two elite snipers privately contracted to guard opposing watchtowers that overlook a highly secretive, fog-covered gorge. Contact with the outside world and each other is strictly forbidden. Without revealing too much, curiosity and isolation overcome mission protocol as Kane and Drasa quickly engage in long-distance flirting, playing telephone with magnified scopes and an infinite supply of notepads. Early on, perfunctory table setting introduces the two highly skilled personnel as loners with nothing to lose, establishing their willingness to work such a remote post and preexisting desperation to make human contact. As it turns out, distance is just a test to see how far love can travel.
Reanimating the decade-old YA genre mashup trend, director Scott Derrickson (Sinister, The Black Phone) dutifully adheres to the story’s blend of action/sci-fi horror tropes with romance narrative trappings. The similarities don’t stop there. Lovers divided, here literally, by shadowy powers beyond their purview. An imposing matriarch (Moore in Mockingjay, Winslet in Divergent, now Sigourney Weaver) pulls the strings by exercising complete control over our leads. There’s even an eclectic soundtrack peppered with current indie rock acts, notably a from The Dead Weather scoring the end credits. Of course, Teller and Taylor-Joy aren’t playing teenagers navigating a dystopian-set love triangle but career professionals whose love language includes assassination, PTSD and kill shot records. Still, the comparisons uncanny, the results surprisingly enjoyable.
Despite its dated narrative DNA and farfetched dialogue, The Gorge is a welcome, familiar retreat. A bygone relic that couldn’t care less about current world affairs, the film’s unfussy politics and lightweight storytelling make for a modest, entertaining balm that shouldn’t have been relegated to a streaming-only release. Yes, the necessary shifts in tone stay about as far away from each other as the two lovers at first, firmly separating the romance and action between set pieces. The uninspired creature design and visual effects lack specificity, the entire film sagging from anonymous jargon like “Hollow Men” and “cloakers,” with no real humanized character moments between Kane and Drasa.
But if that bothers you at all, you’re expecting too much. The Gorge is happy to do away with such pretense, letting Teller and Taylor-Joy’s adequate chemistry carry the romance and action with just enough charisma and athletic aplomb. Above all else, Derrickson’s B-movie genre exercise succeeds with simplistic clarity and commitment to its contrasting genre demands. Despite a streaming burial by Apple, The Gorge will hopefully cross the great expanse of the platform’s algorithm as a slight but slickly made tale of love and human connection knowing no bounds.
