Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller Fall in The Gorge and Also Love

What is it about the lonely sniper-assassin figure that so entices the genre filmmaker? There’s the elite, superpower-adjacent mystique of a lone-wolf killing machine, of course, and how cinematically he or she can be depicted, lurking in the shadows, barrel of a gun peeking outward. But plenty of movies also try to use the conceit of the absurdly gifted niche-market loners as figures of genuine pathos – despite the fact that they probably don’t actually exist. Obviously military snipers are a genuine profession, but that’s never enough; a guy like Levi (Miles Teller) in a movie like Apple TV+’s The Gorge has to be one of the top five most skilled marksmen in the world, a black-ops veteran perfectly willing and able to sign up for a questionably sourced yearlong gig in a tower at the edge of a gorge – location undisclosed, even to him. Similarly, a gal like Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), perched at a near-identical tower by a different set of handlers on the other side of the massive gorge, has to be similarly skilled, similarly shadowy, plus poetically compartmentalized. In a clumsy early scene, she hands old bullet casings over to her elderly father, so that he can absorb any lingering feelings of guilt she might harbor.

With such a po-faced set-up, The Gorge seems poised for peak insufferability, just as director Scott Derrickson’s previous feature The Black Phone appeared dead-on convinced that it was telling a meaningful, heartfelt coming-of-age story, rather than engaging in a bunch of exploitation hokum. But as Levi and Drasa settle into their respective gigs patrolling the edge of the gorge and shooting anything that comes out, the movie almost miraculously settles into something no less silly, but surprisingly tender. Drasa, whose orders we infer may be less draconian than those imposed on Levi by his boss (Sigourney Weaver), starts to communicate across the way via written messages, held up for Levi’s binoculars. He hesitates, but joins in, perhaps because he is looking at a raven-haired Anya Taylor-Joy. Time passes, and a bond forms across the yawning distance between the two of them. Eventually, they dare to bridge the gap, despite the dangers that lurk below them.

It’s difficult to measure the possibility of spoiling The Gorge, because although it’s predictable in many broad strokes, it also does its best to shift genres multiple times within its two hours and change. The story is never as minimalist as its premise suggests; even before Drasa and Levi reach their posts, it’s saddled with unnecessary early scenes that, as mentioned, significantly lower expectations about what kind of fake-ass streaming movie you’re about to watch. The strange-circumstances two-hander doesn’t last, either; nor, for that matter, does an extended dive into Resident Evil territory, where our heroes suddenly find themselves in an action-horror realm. And the film’s climax – particularly how it deals with a ticking clock that is more or less shrugged off – feels a bit like a patch job, a scramble to resolve a few different types of movies without infuriating its potentially disoriented audience.

This all makes The Gorge sound like a screenwriter-brained genre mash-up, a self-conscious attempt to create something for people who claim to pine for “original” movies but really just want a new ripoffs of their favorite fantasies. (Again: see The Black Phone, though that one had source material, whereas this one just feels like one of those movies adapted from a comic book created with the express purpose of being optioned for a movie.) Yet despite or maybe because of its unusual, constant-reset rhythms, large swaths of the movie actually work. It helps that Derrickson has two genuine stars on his side in the form of Teller and Taylor-Joy who both, lacking an infrastructure for proper romantic comedies, channel that energy into an unusually convincing version of a romance that would normally be obligatory at best. By the time Drasa throws on some Yeah Yeah Yeahs vinyl for a close-clinch dance scene with her American counterpart, these characters with cartoon backstories have acquired a tenderness, humanizing in each other’s company and softening the genre-picture clichés that initially shape them.

Derrickson also, to his credit, obviously loves gnarly creature-horror, eventually throwing his lovebirds into a hellishly mutated world that time forgot, or at least should have forgotten; the overplotted and, again, super-screenwriterly explanation goes more into detail than most will require. Before the need to overexplain and then tie up loose ends takes over, however, The Gorge makes a bunch of automatic gunfire, exploding zombies, and tightening tentacles look, well, at least kind of romantic, even if that’s just refracted glow from the earlier, quieter scenes.

Not a lot about The Gorge makes total sense. Given what we learn about the gorge, the idea that it requires a pair of ultra-precise snipers rather than, say, a fully armed military installation is, at best, confusing. The details of the quasi-zombiefication process have been given all of the thought and consideration you might see in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. But in a weird way, its weaknesses only shore up its bona fides as a romance: Love is irrational, love lifts us up where we belong, love throws us into a misty pit full of bio-experiments gone horribly wrong. This is the kind of monster-packed love story that will make a Paul W.S. Anderson fan swoon and, well, guilty as charged.

Director: Scott Derrickson
Writer: Zach Dean
Starring: Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sigourney Weaver
Release Date: February 14 (Apple TV+)

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.