Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy team up with Scott Derrickson for an ambitious, enjoyable thriller. So why isn’t The Gorge being advertised anywhere?
The trailer for The Gorge, Scott Derrickson’s latest genre-bending film, doesn’t really tell the whole story. It shows Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy’s characters, highly skilled mercenaries, assigned to watch over the titular gorge, where something spooky lurks. Naturally, the two fall in love and the trailer sells The Gorge as a strange action-romance hybrid, but the reality is much more complex.
Derrickson is best known for his work in the horror genre with films like The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, Sinister and The Black Phone, the latter receiving a sequel later this year. While the aforementioned promo for The Gorge doesn’t exactly market the film as a horror, it quickly becomes one, and a good one, too.
There’s a hint of The Last Of Us in there, a healthy dose of Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and a whole lot of horror. The editing is a little choppy, but the chemistry between the leads and the story itself is interesting enough to look past that.
As I watched Teller and Taylor-Joy’s Levi and Drasa explore the gorge’s secrets, I kept asking myself: is this actually good? I enjoyed The Gorge immensely, but I wasn’t expecting to. Of course, the talent behind and in front of the camera are great, but somehow the film’s quality still came as a bit of a surprise.
Why? Because, apart from a single trailer, there’s been no marketing for it. Then again, AppleTV+ has form here. The streamer pumps money into genuinely great TV shows like Silo and Severance, but you rarely spot adverts for them, and their fandom sometimes still feels like an exclusive online club.
Remember CODA? The film won Best Picture at the Oscars, but it came and went with no further fanfare. Killers Of The Flower Moon, Argylle and Napoleon were given cinema releases, but films like The Instigators, Wolfs and Tetris had no such luck. The streamer’s next big release is Joseph Kosinski’s F1, starring Brad Pitt, and it’s looking like the film is heading to cinemas, thanks to a partnership with Warner Bros.
On AppleTV+’s YouTube channel, I had to scroll pretty far down to find the only trailer released for The Gorge – and that was two months ago. Considering the film is out this week, you’d think there would be clips or at least another trailer to remind audiences that there’s a film directed by an award-winning director, starring two pretty major stars, available to watch.
We said something similar about Captain America: Brave New World. A major Marvel film in cinemas, but two weeks beforehand, you’d have been hard pressed to notice. In the end, the promo ramped up for the Marvel movie, but it did lead to a feeling that maybe the film… wasn’t that good? In the case of Brave New World, that seems to have been the case because the film simply isn’t very good.
I went into The Gorge with similar worries. I didn’t think I’d enjoy it as much as I did. Why isn’t a film like this getting a cinema release, even a small one? It looks great, there’s some impressive CGI work in there, and Teller and Taylor-Joy put in a lot of effort to sell the romance and action. Ten years ago, The Gorge would probably have enjoyed at least a moderately successful run in cinemas.
I’m a defender of streaming. It makes films accessible for people who, for one reason or another, can’t see them in cinemas and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper, too. But if you’re going to put a film on streaming, at least make it clear that it’s there and worth your time. If films like The Gorge keep getting buried in the depths of streaming services, what hope does original filmmaking have?
The Gorge is available on AppleTV+ from 14th February.
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