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.