Forget the romantic sparring, it’s Valentine’s slay

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This article was published 14/02/2025 (605 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’re wondering about the current state of onscreen love, you might want to consider one of this year’s Valentine’s Day tie-ins. Heart Eyes is a “romantic slasher film” about a masked killer who travels from city to city, murdering multiple couples on Feb 14.

The movie’s tagline is, “stay single — stay safe.”

This might seem like a gratuitously bloody way to announce the death of conventional cinematic romance. But it’s true that the kind of serious, swoony emotion seen in old-time dramatic films like Brief Encounter, An Affair to Remember and Love Story is increasingly rare.

The traditional romantic comedy, relying on high-spirited, Tracy-and-Hepburn-type sparring, also seems to be on the decline.

Part of the reason for this romantic slump might be economic. Mid-budget movies that mostly involve grown-up characters talking to each other are increasingly rare, as the industry bifurcates into little indie films that don’t get much distribution and massively expensive CGI-driven franchises that take over the multiplex.

Still, if the movies seem reluctant to focus too intensely on love, which is regarded as a kind of demographic bringdown, they do sneak in some romance. It’s often absorbed into multi-hyphen hybrid-genre pics, which are viewed as potentially more popular.

Last year’s The Fall Guy, for instance, was an actioner and a comedy and a romance. The sparks between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt really flew, this being a story where flirting involved people literally being set on fire. (And safely and effectively extinguished! Way to go, stuntpeople.)

Or take the Winnipeg-shot action-rom-com Love Hurts, which just got a Valentine’s-adjacent release. Here, the hero (Ke Huy Quan) is seen baking pink heart-shaped cookies just before getting his hand stabbed to a table.

But maybe the kookiest proof our culture has become increasingly uncomfortable about looking at love straight on is The Gorge, a movie that premièred on Apple TV+ with a deliberate Valentine’s Day release.

Colossally silly as a love story, this CGI extravaganza is almost as preposterous as an action-adventure-sci-fi-horror whatever-the-hell-this-is flick.

Like many romantic movies, The Gorge highlights two ridiculously beautiful leads, Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller. These two gorgeously cheekboned people fall in love over the course of the story, but following the usual formula, they first need to overcome obstacles.

In a template that goes back to Jane Austen, romantic obstacles usually involve misunderstanding, miscommunication or meddling. Here the barrier is ludicrously literal. Our two would-be lovers are separated by a gorge — an actual gorge — filled with some kind of murky, monstrous world-destroying force.

Sure, 21st-century dating is hard, but as a symbol of the gap between straight men and women, this feels like overkill.

Taylor-Joy is Drasa, a lethal Lithuanian assassin. Teller is Levi, an ace U.S. Marine Corps sniper. Each is an emotional loner, which is kind of an occupational hazard. Each has been given a year-long super-secretive special assignment at an undisclosed location. The two operatives end up in two concrete, Cold War-era lookout posts, facing each other over a mist-covered gorge.

As Levi discovers, since the end of the Second World War, highly skilled marksmen (and women) — always one from Eastern Bloc countries and one from NATO nations — have been tasked with guarding this gorge. The operatives have no contact with the outside world, and communication with their opposite number is strictly forbidden.

And while this sounds like a geopolitical metaphor, it turns out to be a romantic one. Drasa and Levi are separated not so much by emotional hangups as by “lethal tactical barriers.” Tripwires, containment fences and suspended mines aside, though, can’t these two crazy kids see they’re made for each other?

Within the context of an ever-present threat of global annihilation, Levi and Drasa pursue an oddly generic romance. They “meet cute” using high-powered binoculars. They bond over a shared love of the Ramones. They make each other laugh with jokes about shrapnel injuries. (Hilarious!)

The two spend a romantic evening drinking wine and talking shop. (Best shot? Over 3,241 metres, with gusty winds.) In fact, it would all be adorable if it weren’t for that abyss of shrieking existential horror out of which monstrous, murderous things periodically crawl. (“The gorge is the door to hell, and we’re standing guard at the gate,” as one character suggests.)

Eventually, the pair go from being comically incurious about what’s actually going on to a full-on immersion in spooky horror. The Gorge ends up being a bonkers kind of When Harry Met Sally-meets-H.P.-Lovecraft scenario, and let’s just say Levi and Drasa’s second date is a doozy.

Love and commitment are hard these days, The Gorge’s filmmakers seem to be saying, and if it takes a potentially Earth-ending crisis for a guy and a girl to get together, well, all the world loves a lover.

For those of us who prefer our romances with fewer CGI explosions, it could be pointed out that you can get similar results with a misdelivered note or a mistaken first impression.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca