The Gorge was released on Valentine’s Day, making it a big romantic gamble for Apple. Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy, and a mist-filled canyon of unimaginable terror? Scott Derrickson’s romance-doused action-horror isn’t lacking in concept but struggles under the weight of its many ideas.

Levi Kane (Teller) and Drasa (Taylor-Joy) are elite snipers from West and East. When both accept identical missions, Kane from a mysterious American woman, Bartholomew (Sigourney Weaver), and the Lithuanian assassin Drasa from the Kremlin, they take up point in respective towers on either side of a vast gorge. It’s not long before they learn the space between them is home to monsters only known as ‘Hollow Men’, and their job is to ensure they stay put.

A primary rule is that the east and west towers must never communicate, but as months stretch out, Kane and Drasa form a bond that brings them into each other’s arms and to the heart of the gorge’s long-hidden chilling secrets.

There’s a thrill in a high-profile horror inspired by the poems of T.S. Eliot. Broken into month chapters during the snipers’ tour of duty, the mystery of the Hollow Men knowingly ends in the cruellest month, April. On the way, there are the bloody footprints, the sense of a third walking beside Kane and Drasa and the twilight world of the gorge itself. But despite The Gorge’s undeniable dips into Eliot’s The Wasteland, you’d be forgiven for missing it. 

The chance to make a metaphysical, modernist horror is lost in unlimited ammo as two of the greatest snipers in the world keep the action tactile. 

There’s a real sense that The Gorge can’t decide which side of the chasm it wants to end up. Zach Dean’s script is packed with ideas, but while it fails to explore Eliot’s influence on more than face level, it also scuppers Cold War intrigue in the glasnost between the sniping lovers. 

The first half of the film sees the pair’s relationship develop as the months roll on, and this is arguably the film’s strongest part. Derrickson struggles with introducing the characters before they take their posts — establishing Drasa’s relationship with her father and Kane’s PTSD — and those scenes could perhaps have been left on the cutting room floor to strengthen the film’s core. 

As soon as the pair are forced to head into the terror and truth of what lies between them (in an admittedly thrilling jump into the unknown), the twists and what could have been a taut mesmeric thriller told through shades of trust and mistrust resort to Resident Evil.

The quality shines through in some great production design — particularly the twilight world of clashing times and creatures, where stunning alien cinematography picks out mauves, red, and yellow. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score is typically brilliant, too. But even some well-staged set-pieces and the final crowd-pleasing mission of derring-do (and do-gooding) can’t overcome the fact that there could have been much more between the watchtowers.