Why You Liked … The Gorge

Nothing says ‘first date’ like climbing into a hellpit your employer explicitly told you not to.

There’s a common conceit in most stories: we need a galvanising enemy, someone we can punch right in the nuts and not feel bad about it. Most enemies are made, not born, because humans have outcompeted all the apex predators. All we’ve got left to fight is each other. 2025’s The Gorge puts forward a question: what if hate isn’t the answer?

What if Americans and Russians actually have something in common? Hold the phone, because we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Shared Values or Shared Survival?

We set out in The Gorge following Miles Teller’s Levi. Levi has done some shit, man, and he just wants the world to forget about him for a while. Or maybe he wants to forget about the world, and what he’s done to it. He’s a mercenary, the kind of guy you send to clean up the bullshit your A-listers left behind after they dropped the ball during evac. He’s the perfect person to pit against the entire Russian military, or perhaps just their best assassin.

Anya Taylor-Joy plays Russia’s best, the charming-but-haunted Drasa. Drasa wound up at the gorge in a similar manner: she’s also done some shit, seen worse, and has kills on the board for US-Russia conflicts, although her LinkedIn profile probably just says ‘Results-Oriented’. Drasa doesn’t mind seeing what colour red, white, and blue bleeds. Hell, she might even be looking forward to finding out. You know, for professional development.

It’s an unlikely setup for a sci-fi romance, because these two should be jonesing to reheat the Cold War. Instead, they become friends… but they hope for more. Even with international espionage contacts and a kill list longer than your arm, it’s still hard to meet people, right?

The real ticket we’re buying when we stream The Gorge isn’t that there are monsters at the bottom of the ravine. Of course there are monsters. No, the real draw is that we’re better at fighting monsters when we find out what we have in common. The differences Levi and Drasa are supposed to uphold crumble when they share their experiences. Both know you don’t make it out of this life alive, and it’s better to stare hell right in the eye than cower on your knees. They’ve been to hell and stood at its gates, after all.

But now they’ve got something to fight for: each other.

Trust Versus Indoctrination

You don’t have to walk too far to bump into someone’s doctrine these days. Levi and Drasa are primed to be wary of it. They’ve seen more than red against blue on social media: they’ve been trained to shoot the enemy, not post about it. Imagine: actually doing something instead of just fluffing for likes on X.

What they learn in the early parts of the movie is that both sides are kind of the same. The chain of command can be rusty. We miss the friends we left behind. And it can be lonely when you’re stationed solo in the dark.

The real surprise for both of them isn’t that they meet each other. It’s that inside themselves, they’re actually… nice people. While they’re weary of fighting someone else’s wars, and have an earned pragmatism that allows them to stand back-to-back when the monsters come, they also have a shared hidden vulnerability: they weren’t quite good enough to take it all without breaking. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be at the gorge.

The message isn’t just that soldiers on opposite sides do hard things and get PTSD, then learn to love each other. The lesson here is that it’s true for all of us. Life’s a tricky beast to ride right to the end. You start off not being tall enough to get on, and by the end you can’t wait to leave. We’re bombarded by other people’s messages and buy into them too often. But if we stop for a moment to listen, really listen, we might hear the sound of another person’s heart beating.

It’s an opportunity to put down the brainwashing and pick up our humanity. We can be friends with people who don’t look or sound like us. Levi and Drasa manage it, and in doing so are able to not only complete their mission, but save us all.

Redemption Without Exposition

The Gorge makes great use of star power. Miles Teller shows us through his posture and tone that he’s carrying a weight he would dearly love to put down, but can’t work out how without putting his spine out. Anya Taylor-Joy gives us a performance where she hides her guilt behind a subtle sarcasm and deviousness, always trying to keep one step ahead of herself. She doesn’t want to look in the rearview mirror.

There is no weighty exposition here. If you’re watching The Gorge, you’re in it for a sci-fi romance with monsters, and it’ll get you right to the payload in the shortest possible time. The beauty of Teller and Taylor-Joy’s performances is that they ooze a shared understanding of the bad shit they’ve done. There’s discovery of shared operations, being on opposite sides of the same battlefield, and realising… none of it matters. They’ve sinned, but they know another sinner understands, and we get to see that in the handwritten signs they first use to communicate with each other, or how much time they’re willing to spend playing chess.

We learn they’re both nice people; that despite their careers, there is genuine goodness in there. It’s what called them to serve in the first place. This is what overcomes the ideological bullshit. It leads the story towards a genuinely lovely romance – a chance for two broken souls to find peace, perhaps with each other, or in each other, if only for a moment before the monsters arrive.

The curious thing is their romance isn’t a path to redemption. It’s a path through it. The film gives it to us as a moment of earned peace before shit gets real, but it’s the romance that’s going to get Levi and Drasa out alive. Without learning about each other, there’s no way they’ll get through what’s been hiding at the bottom of that ravine. It’s an odd gesture that makes us cheer for two people with ridiculously high body counts. We want to believe they’re worthy of each other, if only because it means we might find a way back ourselves.

However, it’s not all romance and war stories. Did you forget about the ravine?

The Mystery of the Monsters

If you missed the fact there are monsters in The Gorge, you haven’t been paying attention. The problem here isn’t that the monsters are us, or that the whole thing could have been avoided if we’d used our words to communicate. The film’s central thesis is that no one makes it out of Gorge duty alive, and the big question Drasa and Levi have – the mystery that surrounds their existence, if not the audience’s perception – is what happened to the people who came before. Did they get offed for knowing too much, or is there something else going on at the bottom of that ravine?

The plot device here is that the gorge is infested with things that want to eat your face. If you’re starting to wonder how two people can stand against an army of ravening, flesh-eating psychos, you’re asking the right questions. The Gorge casts Levi and Drasa as their world’s whispered-about, deadly efficient versions of John Wick’s ‘Baba Yaga’, but they’re not superheroes. They’re soldiers, and while their mission is described as keeping the monsters in, that’s not really it at all.

Without spoiling the reveal, I can say they’re a sort of canary in a corporate coal mine. As soldiers, they believe it’s their job to protect us against things that go bump in the night, and they never consider that they’re a hurricane warning system for corporate greed. Nothing says ‘ethical oversight’ like hiring two PTSD-riddled super-assassins and hoping they don’t compare notes, right?

Corporations are often managed by fucking psychos who don’t understand human emotion, and they’ve correctly figured out that pitting sworn enemies against each other should let distrust sort out any problems of collusion. But Levi and Drasa have red in their ledgers. They want absolution for what they’ve done when called to service. They share a desire for truth and their own flavour of justice, and it’s this ladder that lets us finally climb toward redemption.

The Nature of Enemies

The Gorge is a fun sci-fi action romance, but it has a deeper message. It demands we consider whether enemies are even real, or an ideological fabrication to serve the needs of others. It suggests individual connection can overcome systemic hostility.

Our world, on-screen or off, is often defined by clear-cut villainy. There’s an unseen power in a story that blurs the line between East versus West, finding heroism in unexpected cooperation. It’s weird watching a movie that makes us yearn for this, and also shows us how attainable it is, if we only do an ounce of work.

It’s another example of how the People In Charge™ are often the worst sort to deal with any crisis of humanity. Whether it’s Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, or the ongoing Israel/Palestine Gaza war and wider tensions, or even India and Pakistan’s entrenched conflict, we see military readiness on both sides and a very low willingness to talk. Often the people doing the bleeding and the dying have been taught the other side is wrong and should be stopped.

Closer to home, our own channels of communication are breaking down. We rarely speak about what we have in common, only what we disagree on. It’s red versus blue, all the way down. The Gorge suggests it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s not being trite and saying we hug it out. There’s work to be done. But maybe we can get there with willingness, time, and the belief that enough people have bled for another person’s ideology.

What did you think of The Gorge? Let me know in the comments if you were cheering for romance, redemption, or just in it for the vodka. If you prefer making friends rather than enemies, take the path of nuclear disarmament toward that Like button, and if you love rabbit pie as much as Levi and Drasa, hit subscribe. And thanks for watching!