The Gorge (2025) Movie Review: A Hurried and Hollow Would-Be Blockbuster

Apple TV+ may not have been birthed from the COVID-19 pandemic—arriving on our home screens mere months prior at the tail-end of 2019—but like its family-oriented counterpart Disney+, the streamer’s rise came in tandem with a moment perfectly (albeit morbidly) suited to clients remaining planted in one place with nowhere else to go. Perhaps not striking while the iron is hot, the tech giant-turned-film studio has finally decided, in 2025, to marry its initial ambitions for blockbuster fare with the very ambiance of isolation that put a damper on those plans when theatrical viewing was still part of their primary business plan.

“The Gorge,” arriving straight to the streamer just in time for the season of manufactured love, makes prominent use of protracted longing when there are no other options to be found but the one staring you in the face. At the same time, director Scott Derrickson and screenwriter Zach Dean dive into this cavern head-first with the inclination to make the synthetic attraction between its subjects blossom into something more organic. In that sense, the film becomes a perfect confluence of chemical engineering—from our recently strengthened weariness towards isolation to our growing hunger for star-driven action/romance entertainment—that comes together as harmoniously as any one of the decrepit beings that lie deep in the valley that separates our star-crossed strangers.

Those beings are colloquially referred to as “hollow men”—a play off the title of a T.S. Eliot poem; don’t worry if you forget that, for the film will be quick to remind you—and nobody tasked with guarding the posts knows precisely what they are or what they’re doing at the bottom of the titular gorge. All our two assigned mercenaries are told by the superiors who placed them in this remote locale that they are to remain posted on their respective ends of the mysterious canyon—forbidden from contacting one another—and contain it in the event that any hollow men feel the inclination to ascend.

The Gorge (2025) — A still from “The Gorge” (2025)

The star-crossed strangers meant to keep to themselves are American ex-marine Levi (Miles Teller) and Lithuanian contract killer Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy, whose accent flip-flops between vaguely fake Russian and straight-up American). Things go as planned for roughly six months before Drasa begins to feel the slow sting of solitude (even if we never do, but more on that in a second), and begins corresponding with her counterpart via cutesy “You Belong With Me”-esque signage. One thing leads to another, and a taboo interaction leads to a taboo crossing into the deadly gorge (this isn’t a spoiler; it’s both in the trailer and is pretty much the only direction in which a film of this type can move).

From here, “The Gorge” essentially spends a large chunk of its latter half acting as a prolonged version of that one insect-laden ravine scene from Peter Jackson’s “King Kong.” It’s in this area that Derrickson’s direction—his past as a primarily horror-driven filmmaker—best serves the film, as the biologically skewed world of the hollow men lends itself decently to some goosebump-inducing imagery whenever the shiny fog surrounding it gives way. (One particular scene involving what amounts to a giant Venus fly trap is especially primed to make the hairs on your neck stand at attention.) This is, of course, whenever Derrickson actually manages to overcome the overproduced polish of the film’s home-ready appearance; any scene taking place above the gorge looks like a desktop screensaver, and any scene below looks like a live-action reimagining of “Osmosis Jones” if the host body was that of a flu-ridden Snoop Dogg.

The film’s visuals are really only the second or third issue, though, for “The Gorge,” in its attempts to harness the isolation of its setting, completely fails to let itself simmer in any meaningful way to give its subsequent romance a real sense of flavor. Whatever baggage Drasa is carrying along for this year-long mission, Dean’s script and Derrickson’s pacing make no effort to create the sense that anything more than the real-time length of 30 minutes has passed before these two start making googly eyes that we’re meant to believe have been stirring for months.

Ignoring the fact that Taylor-Joy’s continued propensity for kicking ass doesn’t distract from her character’s every decision indicating that she should be the last person any organization picks for such a task (Teller, for all his white bread stoicism, at least fits the profile of an expendable soldier with “nothing ahead but the next job”), Derrickson simply fails to make any of his chosen beats hit with the impact of a sniper’s perfectly aimed bullet.

Too rushed and standardized to find the fundamental force that can pull two strangers together—or even, in a “Stars at Noon” sense, the entirely surface-level force that can pull two horny people together in spite of the fact that they have no chemistry beyond the thirst for any readily available bodies— “The Gorge” is so concentrated on exploring the depths of its well-worn canyon that it never realizes it’s looking in the wrong crevices altogether. These glorified bouncers may wish the gorge was empty, but Derrickson could have benefitted from the presence of something more to fill in that gap.