The Gorge (Crooked Highway, Lit Entertainment Group, Skydance Media, Apple TV+, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately the second film my husband Charles and his mother Edi watched with me on our recent vacation, The Gorge (screened July 28) was considerably more to my taste than Luck. Instead of a fey children’s fantasy, The Gorge was a definitely adult action-adventure thriller about two professional hit people, Levi (Miles Teller) and Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), who are assigned to opposite ends of The Gorge to shoot and kill any of the monstrous creatures who live at the bottom of The Gorge and periodically try to escape and menace the normal humans above. During the first hour of this 127-minute movie the two are separated by The Gorge and can do no more than look at each other and call out boasts by phone, mostly centered around their previous sniper assignments. (The film opened with Drasa picking off a man getting out of a plane at such a long distance Levi would have assumed it was impossible.) Naturally Levi is getting the hots for Drasa, and the feelings appear to be mutual, because at the halfway mark Levi shoots a rappelling cord across The Gorge so he can traverse the distance and have an in-person physical date with her. When he reaches her side of The Gorge she at first tells him he stinks (literally!) and forces him to take a shower, then steals the clothes she left for him so he has to go to her place naked. Eventually they have dinner together and ultimately make love, though on the way back his cord breaks and he falls into The Gorge. She lowers herself into The Gorge and attempts to rescue him, but they come face-to-face with the monsters of The Gorge, whom we’ve already caught glimpses of and know they’re humanoid but with faces that look eaten away and overall spindly shapes that make them look like their bones have somehow come through at least partially to their outsides.

Our intrepid hit-people come across the remnants of a secret laboratory set up on the floor of The Gorge during World War II. Through a film canister hand-labeled “May God Forgive Us,” Levi and Drasa project the film and on it there’s a woman scientist giving a lecture about how the creatures of The Gorge came to be. [Spoiler alert!] It seems that the U.S., Great Britain and the Soviet Union, while they were allied during World War II, not only started a secret project in the U.S. to build the world’s first nuclear weapon, they also started a bioweapons project on the Gorge floor. The intent was to create unstoppable soldiers that couldn’t be killed and would just charge at the enemy without fear for their own lives. (Anyone who’d seen the 1942 PRC film The Mad Monster would have known this was a bad idea.) Only they did such a great job re-engineering human DNA that it fused with the DNA of particularly violent animals to create these bastard forms of life that Levi and Drasa had originally been assigned to kill whenever any of them tried to escape The Gorge and enter the world of living people. What’s more, the mutation that created the monsters is contagious. If you’re exposed to the monsters and you don’t fall victim to the mutation in five days, you’re home free; otherwise, you’ll become one of the monsters yourself. The second half of The Gorge, directed with suspenseful power by Scott Derrickson from a well thought-out script by Zach Dean, is nearly non-stop action as Our Heroes not only have to escape the monsters but also have to contend with the machinations of their nominal commanders, particularly Levi’s immediate supervisor Bartholomew (Sigourney Weaver, who must be awfully tired of these kinds of roles by now since the original Alien and its sequelae).

The film had already been reminding me a lot of Prizzi’s Honor – the late movie by John Huston starring his daughter Anjelica and Jack Nicholson as Mafia hit-people who meet and fall in love even though they work for rival factions in the Mob and they’ve been assigned to kill each other – and Charles thought of it too when Bartholomew gave Levi the order to kill Drasa. In the end Levi takes a big fall off a ledge into a river and we think he’s dead, while Drasa waits out the five days to see if she’s going to come down with the mutation and become a monster. Luckily Drasa escapes the disease and goes to her secret redoubt in the south of France, where she and Levi had talked about settling down once they escaped their commanding officers – and, sure enough, going for the happy ending of the Bogart-Bacall vehicle Dark Passage (1947) instead of the cynical, violent one of Prizzi’s Honor, Levi turns up there two months later. The Gorge is a neatly made fusion of action-adventure and horror, though the horror elements are played down enough that even people like me who don’t like modern-day horror films could enjoy it. It also benefits from great casting in the leads; Miles Teller has been in quite a few major movies lately but the only ones in which he made an impression on me are Divergent and its sequelae, and in those he was cast as a villain. And Anya Taylor-Joy is equally good, sufficiently androgynous that in her opening scene I thought she was a young man. Derrickson and Dean also neatly characterized the two leads by their different tastes in music, which work out quite the opposite from how you’d expect: Levi listens to classical music (specifically the Prelude from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, played by two different cellists (Jeff Taynor and Martynas Levickis – were we supposed to believe Levi had two different LP’s of it?) while Drasa loves 1970’s punk, particularly “Blitzkrieg Bop” by The Ramones, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Spitting Off the Edge of the World,” The Dead Weather’s “I Feel Love (Every Million Miles),” and Twisted Sister’s cover of the traditional Christmas carol “O Come, All Ye Faithful” – the sort of record that makes you ask yourself, “Is that … ?”