Somewhere the Baltics, an American and former Marine named Levi, played by a goateed Miles Teller, is assigned to guard a gorge. He’s installed high up in a fancy watchtower that’s equipped with comfortable living quarters, plenty of food and well-stocked bookshelves. Previous occupants have chalked quotes from the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, T.S. Eliot and Cyril Connolly on the walls.
An identical tower sits across the gorge. In that one is Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), a dark-haired Lithuanian agent. We first see her paying a visit to her accordion-playing father, and we meet Levi being kind to his dog on the beach, so we know they are good people. While they’re instructed by their espionage overlords to distrust each other, they quickly contrive to get physically closer.
Directed by Scott Derrickson from a script by Zach Dean, “The Gorge” takes an already implausible premise and then catapults it out of the espionage genre and into science-fiction and horror. As it happens, at the bottom of this gorge are creatures called “the hollow men” (more Eliot!) and these gnarly fellows go on the attack after Drasa blasts Ramones music across the divide.
In the meantime, Levi’s commander, played by Sigourney Weaver, is up to no good, ordering the elimination of a previous gorge operative. But for all the elaborate weaponry, production design and (eventually) frantic action offered here, this movie crackles most as a lively pas de deux between Taylor-Joy and Teller, who commendably take their material seriously no matter how seriously ridiculous it gets.
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