This review is dedicated to Jamie Hemmings. Thank you for sharing your love of horror but more importantly your friendship. Speak No Evil still sucks. You are missed by many.
It isn’t by chance that Sigourney Weaver plays the shadowy Bartholomew in The Gorge. The film itself is vastly influenced by the Alien series. The Gorge is what you would get if in one of their secret labs the Weyland-Yutani Corporation genetically combined Aliens, Resident Evil and Enemy at the Gates.
Enemy is one of my favourite movies of all time. Whether it is movies, books or TV shows, I love playing as Agent 47 of The Hitman series or Karl Fairburne or Harry Hawker in Sniper Elite or watching the sniper character as long as they are done right as they are in Enemy. Having two snipers face-off against each other is double the fun. In The Gorge the snipers, mercenaries (Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy) are stationed on opposite sides of a canyon but work together, join forces to secure the mysterious site during their year-long contract; a site that holds many dark secrets. Besides an arsenal that The Punisher would be proud of, there are automated turrets, explosive mines, that must be attended to on a regular basis.
Among the stringent rules that govern their gig is neither sniper is permitted make contact with the other. Teller and Taylor-Joy break that and many other rules early on discovering that deep inside they are both very troubled and broken people. Both assassins are haunted by the murderous acts they have committed but the ways they deal with that are very different. Taylor-Joy keeps the expended casings handing them off to her father who then “absolves her of her guilt” in his own special, almost mystical way. Teller finds his solace at the bottom of a bottle. Their dark, shadowy and unique lives that nobody but them would fully understand as well as their current assignment brings them together. It isn’t long before Teller and Taylor-Joy are dealing with their first attempted breach and that spurs them on to get to the bottom of the mystery of The Gorge…in more ways than one.
Enough of that emotional crap. What you really want to know about is why The Gorge needs to be guarded year after year? Well, that would be telling but let’s just say the mystifying duty has been passed down through the generations with the predecessors leaving behind notes, advice and a moonshine still to their spiritual successors all the way back to the 1940s. That was when three battalions of soldiers were ordered to investigate the gorge but as per their predestined fate via horror movie , they never returned. Muahaha!
The creature effects and their designs are just brilliant. They reminded me of a mash-up of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, The Last of Us and Alien in some ways. Speaking of Xenomorphs, The Gorge is heavily influenced by the Alien films in all the best ways possible. That is what makes the action so satisfying and the grotesque bits so, well, gross. At its core though, the relationship between Teller and Taylor-Joy is the beating, dark heart of this movie. Teller is the hunky yet vulnerable man of action while Taylor-Joy is quirky, cute, lethal assassin. They gel on every level as actors and characters. The best part being the destructive duo work seamlessly together as a united force unlike what we have seen in recent films where one character will always take a backseat to another, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
The only failing of The Gorge is the dialogue needed another look. Some of the conversations and exchanges, especially in the back half of the movie, are so cheesy and so cliche making you want to scream: “I am too old for this shit!” or “Don’t die on me!” at the top of your lungs.
With The New Mutants, The Northman, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and The Gorge, Taylor-Joy is really building the resume of an action film star while director Scott Derrickson with Sinister, Doctor Strange, The Black Phone and others under his belt is a welcome throwback to directors of the eighties and nineties like John Carpenter, Wes Craven, George Romero, Sam Raimi, Tobe Hooper, etc, who were proud horror auteurs waving that banner high their entire careers. We need more of that today in all the different genres. Perhaps then, we would have even more modern classics like The Gorge by artists who admire, respect and love whatever genre they have their sights set on.
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