The Gorge ★★★

AMERICAN director Scott Derrickson has given us four pretty decent horror films to date – The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, Deliver Us from Evil and Black Phone.

With The Gorge (2025) Derrickson shifts his horror focus from the supernatural to science fiction and adds a heap of action to the mix.

The result is an entertaining genre exercise with good performances and some genuinely suspenseful moments that tries to not take itself too seriously.

The set-up, from writer Zach Dean, is a good one.

Two elite snipers, American Levi Kane and Lithuanian Drasa working for Russia, are chosen by their respective governments to be the new guards of a deep gorge.

They don’t know what may be in the gorge and are transported there in secret, so they have no idea what country they are even in.

Levi is positioned in a tower guarding the Western side, while Drasa is in the Eastern tower. Their task is to stop anything from leaving the gorge

Despite needing to be there for the next 12 months, they are not supposed to make any contact with each other. Of course, the two slowly interact across the void via binoculars and hand-written signs, between furious bouts of automatic gunfire stopping the mysterious inhabitants from escaping.

Eventually Levi decides to abseil across the gorge and join Drasa for a dinner/date, but his return journey is cut short.

Up to this point, roughly the half-way mark of the film, it’s mostly been a lot of intriguing set-up and enjoying the performances from Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy.

But from here The Gorge concentrates much more on the action which is fine but doesn’t set it apart from other genre films.

Watched on Apple TV.