The Gorge(2025)

Submitted by Evan B

Pooper:
Drasa and Levi escape the gorge and when Darklake employees come to liquidate them, the pair manage to activate the failsafe and destroy the monsters in the gorge and the Darklake employees. Levi and Drasa successfully escape and live happily ever after.

Long Ending:
An American military contractor named Levi (Miles Teller) is brought to a meeting with a woman named Bartholemew (Sigourney Weaver) that Levi assumes is the head of a spy agency. Noting that Levi has no family or other ties, Bartholemew enrolls him in a top secret mission. He will spend 1 year living in isolation at a watchtower that looks over a massive gorge in an undisclosed location. The gorge is home to horrible monsters named the Hollow Men. His mission is to (1) make sure the jammers that cloak the gorge from satellites remain in good working order, (2) reload auto-gun turrets and proximity bombs lining the gorge , and (3) otherwise keep the creatures that live within the fog-filled gorge from escaping. When Levi arrives, he learns that there is a similar watchtower on the other side of the gorge that is manned by a Lithuanian sniper named Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy). Levi learns that around World War 2, the Eastern and Western powers agreed to jointly monitor the gorge, nicknamed the “Gateway to Hell.”

After several months, Drasa begins communicating with Levi by writing messages on posterboard and playing music over to him. The pair bond and also protect each other when monsters scale the walls of the gorge in an effort to escape. Although the monsters have a human form, they are made out of plant material and have appendages of animals (like snake tentacles and bear claws). As Levi reads materials in his watchtower, he learns that the military once sent two full battalions into the gorge to clear it out, but none of the soldiers ever returned.

One night, Drasa learns that her father (her only remaining family) has passed away and sinks into depression. Levi manages to construct a zip-line gun and shoots it across the gorge so he can visit Drasa and comfort her. The pair continue to bond and spend several nights together (including sexy times!). With Levi’s monthly check-in coming up, he prepares to zipline back to his watchtower and tells Drasa he loves her. As he is ziplining over the gorge, a monster trying to escape detonates a proximity mine that also destroys the zipline. Levi falls into the gorge. A horrified Drasa grabs weapons and a parachute and leaps into the gorge after him.

The pair reunite inside the gorge and fight off many monsters and creatures. They realize that the monsters have some level of human intelligence and that they are wearing the uniforms of the battalions that journeyed into the gorge decades ago – meaning that the gorge transforms people into these monsters. The pair eventually find a secret bunker and enter. Inside, they find a video from the 1940s and learn that a company called Darklake was conducting bioengineering experiments in an effort to make super soldiers to win World War 2. An earthquake opened the gorge and damaged the facility, caused the experimental fog to be released. All people exposed to the fog for more than a few hours ended up merging with plant and animal life, becoming the monsters that Drasa and Levi have been fighting. As they continue to explore the bunker, the pair find modern equipment installed in the bunker and realize that Darklake is still conducting experiments in the gorge. They realize that while they thought the government was monitoring this site, it actually was Darklake posing as the government. The duo also learn that there is a giant missile that will destroy the gorge as a failsafe, activated only if the satellite jammers go down (that way nobody will ever learn what Darklake has been doing). Darsa and Levi eventually manage to fight their way back out of the gorge, although they are worried that their exposure to the fog may have contaminated them.

Darklake, through its monitoring systems in the gorge, realize the pair have been inside and learned of their secrets. Bartholemew assembles a crew to go and kill Darsa and Levi. When they arrive, they find the watchtowers completely abandoned. As they investigate, explosives that Darsa and Levi rigged are activated that destroy all the satellite jammers. This triggers the failsafe bomb to detonate, which kills all the monsters in the gorge as well as Bartholemew and her team. Several months later, Darsa and Levi reunite at a seaside resort, with neither of them having been contaminated by the fog. The pair lovingly kiss, having survived their ordeal.