The Gorge: Secret Twist of the New Apple TV+ Horror Movie Explained

The Gorge is the new horror-thriller-romance movie from director Scott Derrickson (Sinister, Doctor Strange). As the trailer for the film teased, The Gorge stars Miles Teller (Top Gun: Maverick) and Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga) as an American and Russian sniper (respectively), who each take the mysterious assignment of guarding a watchtower on either side of a massive gorge. The two snipers violate protocol by making contact with one another, quickly sparking a romance between two lonely killers. However, the mission to guard the gorge just as quickly reveals itself to be dire serious, and the two snipers are forced to discover the secret of what is going on at their nightmare post.

The Gorge‘s Secret Twist Explained

The Second Act of The Gorge sees Teller’s character, Levi, get knocked into the gorge while trying to cross back from an in-person date with Taylor-Joy’s character Drasa. Drasa jumps right into the gorge after Levi, and the pair parachute to the bottom, only to find themselves in a nightmare realm, filled with both the monster humanoids that routinely attack their towers, as well as a whole ecosystem of predatory nightmare creatures never seen before.

[RELATED: The Gorge Official Review]

After having to survive in the gorge and find a means of escape, Levi and Drasa make a startling discovery: a lab that dates back to WWII, with videos that explain how the gorge was a chemical weapons test site working alongside Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project, stationed at a site believed to be a mouth to Hell itself. The site was compromised by an earthquake that leaked the chemical weaponry into the surrounding environment, causing unexpected mutations to occur, and fusing different forms of life.

The “hollow men” who have been attacking the gorge are all the soldiers who disappeared into the gorge over the centuries, fused with plant life and insects to create the nightmare hybrids. The other creatures Levi and Drasa encounter follow the same dark logic: human skulls are fused with giant spiders; a moss/fly trap/insect hybrid that tries to slowly trap and eat victims, etc. Levi discerns that he and Drasa aren’t working for some coalition of governments: they’re working for a private corporation that isn’t trying to protect Earth from the gorge creatures: they’re using the gorge as a bio lab, to develop radical new super-soldier advancements. Levi and Drasa eventually manage to escape the gorge, and keep the monsters from following them.

The Gorge Ending Explained

By going into the gorge (Levi and Drasa trigger alarms with their boss Bartholomew (Sigourney Weaver). The corporate shark rallies a wet-work team to fly to the watchtowers and eliminate Levi and Drasa, with Bartholomew leading the op herself. The hit squad thinks they get the drop on the two snipers; instead, Levi and Drasa have a trap of their own set. They outflank and destroy the corporation’s minigun drones, and then each sniper makes a masterful shot, setting off a series of mine explosives on the opposite side. The mines take out the satellites that keep the gorge hidden from detection – which also activates the “Stray Dog Protocol,’ which sets off a hydrogen bomb left at the gorge lab site, annihilating the strange realm forever, and Bartholomew and her team along with it.

Drasa makes it out of the blast and travels to a beautiful cliffside in France, waiting for Levi. Levi doesn’t show up within their chosen timeframe, but eventually tracks down Drasa weeks later, after recovering from his injuries.

The Gorge is streaming on Apple TV+.