I don’t know about you, I feel like I have only heard the word ‘gorge’ maybe two or three times in my life (when talking about the mountain valley, not when someone is gorgeous of course). After finishing this film, you will have heard the word gorge so many times that it makes you think about the word a lot… gorge… what a strange word… anyway this film was not gorge in the slightest. 

A film of two very different halves, one half plays like that one Taylor Swift music video, perfectly written cue cards between two people on opposite sides of a mysterious gorge (there’s that word again) that blossoms into the most chemistry-less romance on screen since the last time Miles Teller had to pretend to be in love with someone. The other half of the movie is sort of like some Resident Evil type action flick that just becomes more and more bland as the story unravels. I commend the film for taking the time to develop this romance between Levi and Drasa, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, but the problem with taking the time to develop this relationship is that they spent a good hour making it the sole focus of the film and that’s a long hour! When suddenly it switches up it feels quite drastic and strange. 

The acting from the two leads isn’t great, Teller is so dreadfully wooden I almost get absolutely no real emotion from him. Anya does try to inject some chemistry into the relationship but when you’re bouncing off that wall there’s not much you can do as an actor. It doesn’t help that she is in that strange wig and that dubious accent, it’s not exactly the best role for her to showcase her talents. Sigourney Weaver phones it in and gets that Apple TV+ pay cheque for her, at most, 5 days of work too.

Director Scott Derrickson is normally a writer on his projects, this is his first sole director credit since 2008’s The Day The Earth Stood Still which was also an action movie with a dip in it’s quality compared to Derrickson’s personal writing projects which are more horror and often are not too awful. The script he is given is poor, especially in some of the dialogue used to set up the story and explain it later on. Building a good film from this script was always going to be tough and I don’t envy the task of creating romance between two actors that don’t meet for 45 minutes and have to fight the blandest of monsters afterwards. If this is a one-for-you type deal then I respect it, I hope Apple green-light one of your good horror scripts. I will say though that I hated all of the song choices in this film, every needle drop felt utterly out of place and completely wrong for the tone of the scene and of the whole film, music supervisor needed some more guidance here because they got it all wrong.

Apple are trying to slowly but surely fill their service with a lot of genre pieces that look expensive but don’t actually have their own distinct style. The CGI was mostly awful and the cinematography is basic and unimaginative. It does feel like the direct-to-DVD film you might find at the bottom of the barrel at the charity shop and that’s okay, just don’t spend $70 million on it and half arse the visuals.