Ivan Radford | On 14, Feb 2025

Director: Scott Derrickson
Cast: Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sigourney Weaver, Sope Dirisu
Certificate: 15

We all know the story. Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. Boy and girl keep watch over an abyss filled with spooky danger. The Gorge, Scott Derrickson’s latest offering, might sound like a B-movie horror, but it’s a surprisingly sweet tale – so it’s only apt that it should arrive on Apple TV+ on Valentine’s Day.

Miles Teller stars as Levi, a soldier-for-hire who doesn’t like the term “mercenary”, but not as much as he doesn’t like himself. A former marine living a lonely, regret-filled existence, he doesn’t seem all that surprised when he’s asked to take on a mysterious, isolated new job: spending a year in a watchtower guarding the titular gorge. Where is it? Goodness knows. Why must he protect it? The answer to that is is queasily obvious: it’s not to stop people going it, but to stop something else coming out.

On the other side of the gorge is Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays Drasa, a Lithuanian fighter who’s an even better shot than he is. Caught up in a secret alliance between eastern and western powers – a truce that the countries themselves may not even know about it – they’re forbidden from speaking to each other. But, of course, before you can say “star-crossed romance”, the pair are sharing Love Actually-style cards using their binoculars. And, you know, firing their sniper rifles at anything that moves in the shadows.

That balance between cute romance and darkly creepy thriller is the secret to The Gorge’s success, because it allows us to see the unlikely couple’s chemistry in action – literally – in the way that they instinctively have each other’s backs. A sign might contain a flirtatious message, but nothing says love like tackling an unearthly monster with your bare hands to save your new sweetheart.

Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy are fantastic, Teller brooding and believable as the physically capable fighter, and Taylor-Joy wiry but ruthless as his committed counterpart. Brief turns from Sope Dirisu, as Levi’s predecessor, and Sigourney Weaver as the pair’s shady employer, ground things with a lived-in sense of peril, but it’s the production design that really ups the stakes – when the unseen threat does emerge, it comes with well-earned jump-scares and a squirming flourish of weirdness. The result is a fun, enjoyably scuzzy slice of sci-fi that shreds your nerves and tugs your heartstrings in equal measure.

Add to Watchlist