Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Two expert snipers — a Lithuanian woman and an American man — are assigned as sentries on either side of a mysterious cloud-filled gorge. Neither is allowed to contact the other; neither knows what country they are in, or what lies in the abyss below. This is, by any standard, a crisp premise for a thriller-horror-action hybrid, the sort that could pay off very nicely — as long as the rules are followed rigorously before being ingeniously bent.No such luck with The Gorge. After a taut set-up, Scott Derrickson’s film gets restless and starts larking around that bit too soon, as moody Miles Teller and impish, punky Anya Taylor-Joy get together across the divide — even fitting in a gratuitous dance duet before the gorge disgorges its secrets.Derrickson made his name as a horror specialist before directing 2016’s Doctor Strange, the most visually inventive film in the Marvel cycle. But The Gorge is drab stuff, with a mechanical video-game feel, devolving into an unwieldy mess of effects that suggests a cut-price hybrid of Lovecraft-style crawling chaos and B-movie “science gone too far”.Taylor-Joy, always enjoyable to watch, ekes some mischief from her character. But given how compelling she was in TV series The Queen’s Gambit, it is a shame to see her wasted in a routine action role, even if she has a little more space to emote than in last year’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. As for Teller, who was so promising in Whiplash, he is another of those appealingly unconventional male leads (like Taron Egerton and Chris Pratt) who has been drearily recrafted as an identihunk, albeit here with a faintly rakish edge. Sigourney Weaver, embodying the Powers That Be, contributes bought-in class — rather more convincingly than the TS Eliot quotes that pepper Zach Dean’s script. Cheddar Gorge isn’t nearly this cheesy.★☆☆☆☆On Apple TV+ from February 14
