The Gorge Manages To Have Some Great Scenes

The Gorge Wastes Several Amazing Horror Scenes

The Gorge is one of the best cosmic horror movies I have ever seen—for the very short time that it actually allows itself to be one. The other (much bigger) part of the movie is a mess.Full of weird decisions, a baffling ending, and so much else wrong with it.

Let’s take it from the top—with, fair warning, full spoilers. Doing so will be the least complicated way to approach matters but not an uncomplicated process. The Gorge is a movie with a multi-layered premise that resists easy explanation, and then it doesn’t stay within any one subgenre for very long. The boiled-down pitch is that you’ve got two people guarding opposite ends of a very deep gorge to make sure nothing escapes from it, and then they end up forming a romantic relationship. Which you may have already noticed is a bit of a mix of adventure and romance with strong fantastical elements. The Gorge is actually set in our world, but it could’ve made for a fantasy story just as easily. The story could’ve been about slaying monsters and finding love.

But that’s not exactly how this movie flows. If you could call it a flow. The pacing is jumpy, jolting, and confusing, both on a scene and story level. The movie begins with front-loaded methodical shots that remind me of my least favorite moments in Pluribus. Characters spend a fair bit of time mechanically going through motions, and then the camera skips us forward some amount of time (often an incorrect amount of time) when it presumably figures the audience is bored with the current step in the scene. While watching this first part, you’d be forgiven for thinking The Gorge is going for a serious drama about the emotional toll of being a killer. It makes several drastic mistakes, including killing the only Black main character in an attempt to shock the audience, and failing to characterize most of its cast beyond them being somber and serious, but that could’ve been fixed/removed, and we could’ve had a passable spy movie.

But you know that’s not what happened. Because the premise kicks in hard and The Gorge becomes a high-concept science fiction story with a strong tinge of supernatural horror. The eerie mystery of what lurks down in that place is compelling. Especially because the movie goes out of its way to keep a realistic tone around the known facts of the gorge.    

But it doesn’t take long for it to flip again. We get the answer of “weird zombies” and then ignore how world-shattering that revelation should be for our characters in favor of what I think this movie wanted to be all along. It becomes a romance story about two people forbidden to communicate—but do anyway. And don’t get me wrong, the actors do a wonderful job at this stage. The storyline framing their romance is sometimes bad, yes. Especially the scene where someone’s forced to leave the shower after their clothes are stolen. But the dialog scenes—at the very least—are well-performed. It’s just that I didn’t sign up for a romance movie. I signed up for a horror/thriller/adventure movie with a big mystery.  

As I said, though, once it got to the horror…damn. The special effects on the zombie-things are lacking a lot of the time, but the landscape of the gorge is truly something to behold. Horrifying, colorful, creative vistas of biological suffering and intense body horror blend with a level of environmental storytelling that any game would hope to replicate. I didn’t care that exposition was sometimes hilariously obvious, because what I was being told was nightmarish in a way that delighted me as a horror fan. The Gorge had an already existing undercurrent of loneliness, despair, nihilism, and—trigger warning—several references to suicide, and they all inform a series of tense and disquieting scenes. The characters act like they have a chance to fully get away from this situation, but it’s heavily hinted that they are properly doomed by what they’ve already done. A lot of cosmic horror stories rely on this template, and I was all ready for the existentially horrifying tragedy. Specifically, a tragedy ending in a double suicide.

But, extra spoilers, that didn’t happen either. The disappointments start in the otherwise amazing cosmic horror section but spiral out more and more. Between an increasing number of out-of-character and weirdly sexist moments (Really, only the highly trained female killer verbally freaks out in that scene?) and an ending that I highly suspect was changed at the last minute (She had a freaking grappling hook the whole time?) the movie turns generic in all the worst ways. Plot points are resolved too easily. Characters say some cringey lines. The ending is a trope you’ve seen many, many times in spy/adventure stories. Perhaps, perhaps I was simply too enamored with the awesome body horror scenes to accept a non-horror-style ending, but you also don’t make a movie with “sometimes death is preferable to suffering” as a major theme and reinforce that conflict/concept with half-melted, silently screaming human jelly and then go for a soaring, happy-go-lucky crowd-pleaser ending with not a hint of bleakness. It’s tonal chaos. It makes The Gorge not a movie but a collection of ideas and scenes and profound sounding declarations that feel like they’re held together by weak glue. If you do give The Gorge a try, by God temper your enthusiasm.

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