The film opens with Levi Kane arriving at a remote military staging area to take over a lonely assignment: an immobile post on the west rim of a vast, hidden gorge. Recruiters place a blacked‑out dossier in his hands and introduce him to a woman called Bartholomew, who hires him on behalf of a secret operation. Levi is a former U.S. Marine scout/sniper; he carries the weight of combat and recurring nightmares into the posting. Bartholomew briefs him that his tower will sit opposite another identical watchtower across the chasm, that both towers are cloaked from satellites by towering jamming arrays, and that his orders are absolute: he must hold his position for a year without physically meeting the opposite sentinel or communicating with the outside world beyond scheduled check‑ins.

On the east rim, a woman named Drasa occupies the counterpart tower. She is a Lithuanian covert operative accustomed to long, dangerous missions and brutal compartmentalization. Before either soldier settles into their watches, Levi relieves his predecessor J.D., a taciturn former British Royal Marine corporal. J.D. walks Levi through the daily routines: the automated turrets and perimeter mines that ring each tower, the motion sensors, the long midday hours spent scanning the gorge for movement. J.D. warns Levi by voice and by a crooked hand gesture about an emergency protocol called "Straydog," an ultimate fail‑safe that he says was used to sterilize the site in extreme circumstances. J.D. tells Levi the old story whispered among the sentries: whole battalions marched into the gorge in the late 1940s and none returned.

Within days of occupying the tower, J.D. proves a brittle man who expects no mercy from his employers. He leaves his post believing he will be exfiltrated and picked up by helicopter. During the extraction, Bartholomew learns he knows too much and issues a cold, executive decision; J.D. is executed on her orders immediately after the helicopter departs, his life ended by personnel working for Bartholomew while he thinks he is finally leaving the gorge behind.

Levi settles into the rhythms of the assignment and experiences recurring, PTSD‑tinted nightmares at night. Drasa endures her own private sorrow: her father Erikas is terminally ill and tells her he plans to die by suicide on Valentine's Day, a choice he makes in private to avoid prolonged pain. Drasa continues her duty at the east tower while tending to the emotional fallout of her father's choice until, on her birthday break from protocol, she breaks the rule of strict non‑communication. She raises a whiteboard, writes a message, and lifts it in the middle distance; Levi, stationed across the gorge, reads it. Their first exchange is terse and curious, then playful. The pair begin to trade insults, jokes, and tactical challenges by penned messages and improvised semaphore. A sharpshooting competition through the middle distance ends in mutual amusement. Over time, the two soldiers fill the silence of the canyon by sending music over to one another and, later, longer messages.

The first deadly test arrives as a tide of humanoid figures attempts to scale the gorge wall and spill into the world. The creatures are grotesque hybrids: they preserve some human shape and wear the tattered uniforms of disappeared battalions, but their skin has fused with foliage, their limbs sprout plant fibers, and they bear animal appendages--sinuous snake‑like tentacles, clawed bear forelimbs. Locals and old records dub them "Hollow Men." The sentries respond by firing rifles and activating automated turrets and ground mines. Levi and Drasa coordinate by radio for the first time in a firefight--not to meet, but to cover angles for one another. The Hollow Men climb, latch, and attempt to pull themselves over the rim; turrets tear at them, explosives blow bodies into ragged pieces, and the watchtowers take shrapnel. The two snipers hold the line; the immediate wave is repelled, but the canyon gives Levi and Drasa a sharper sense of threat.

Six months pass in a rhythm of watches, maintenance, and growing intimacy. Levi improvises small comforts: he tinkers with the tower's mechanical systems, reads military manuals, and fashions a crude zip‑line gun so he can send a cable across the gorge. He trains his marksmanship on distant targets and continues his monthly radio check‑ins with Bartholomew. Drasa endures the quiet of the east tower with equal diligence; when her father dies alone on the date he chose, she collapses into a private grief. Levi notices the absence of messages and, improvising, fires the zip‑line gun. The cable snakes across the gorge, clamps into place at her tower, and Levi zips across to the east rim to sit with her for the night.

They share a meal on the east balcony and trade stories face to face--Levi reads aloud a poem he is writing for Drasa. After a night of conversation and a physical consummation of the bond they have built at a distance, Levi rigs the cable and begins the return trip at dawn. As he crosses the span, a Hollow Man on the gorge slope triggers a proximity mine positioned against the old cable. The blast severs Levi's cable, destroys much of the zip‑line assembly, and sends Levi plummeting toward the gorge. He has no time to prepare a soft landing and, with the cable gone, he falls into the yawning black below.

Drasa immediately reacts. She arms herself, loads a parachute, and leaps from the east rim; the parachute deploys and she swoops down into the gorge after Levi. Levi survives the fall by deploying a parachute of his own as the cable cuts out, but he lands amid mutated flora and hostile life. The two soldiers meet in the canyon floor, terrified and alive. They check each other for injuries because the fall and the detritus of the landscape have left both cut and bruised. Then they begin to fight.

The creatures they face are not simply monsters but transformed humans and animals. The Hollow Men display a grim, residual intelligence; they use rudimentary tactics, drag wounded toward hidden nests, and wear the faded insignia of battalions sent in decades ago. Levi and Drasa shoot and stab their way through tangled thickets of fungal growth, strike at tentacles that try to strangle them, and burn away tufts of moss that act like acid. They push deeper into the gorge, following a broken road and the bones of rusted vehicles that lead to a dilapidated bunker dug into the rock face.

Inside the bunker, under the dust and webs, the pair find the evidence of human experiments: rusted steel consoles, film canisters, and a flickering reel that returns an image of men in lab coats from the 1940s. They run the footage; a scientist in a grainy film explains, via subtitles and broken recordings, that the facility--identified as Darklake--was once a bioweapons research center tasked with producing super‑soldiers for World War II. The science meets ecological horror when an earthquake fractures the mountain and releases an experimental fog. People exposed to the vapor for more than a few hours begin to change: their tissues fuse with plant matter and animal DNA, producing the hybrid forms Levi and Drasa now face. The archival footage ends with hurried notes and a warning: the contaminant spreads with prolonged exposure and cannot be contained easily.

Their exploration reveals that the facility never fully shut down. Modern equipment sits in a secondary chamber; the bunker has been maintained by a private defense contractor also calling itself Darklake, which uses the old designation to mask ongoing experimentation. New logs show satellite uplinks, live feeds, and a system of jamming antennas around the rim that conceal the gorge from external surveillance. Levi and Drasa reason that what they thought was a government operation is actually a corporation masquerading as military authority. Further recordings explain "Straydog" more precisely: it is a nuclear fail‑safe--a missile system that will detonate and sterilize the gorge if the jammers fail, designed to erase the site and everyone in it rather than allow the truth to leak out.

The two snipers collect ammunition, download files, and attempt to establish an exit strategy. They find a working Jeep with a towing winch and start to figure how to use heavy equipment to claw their way up the rough service road and breach the rim. Before they can execute the plan, Levi receives his monthly radio check‑in. Bartholomew's voice, normally clipped, now drops a bomb: she admits she works for Darklake and, in a calm, measured tone, commands Levi to eliminate Drasa. Bartholomew explains that the pair have learned too much. Levi stares at the handset; he refuses. Bartholomew records the refusal and, realizing the danger to her operation, mobilizes a strike team.

Bartholomew dispatches armed men to the gorge, and she also orders Levi's silent predecessor eliminated earlier to protect the chain of secrecy--explaining why J.D. disappeared after being airlifted. The strike team lands on the rim and begins to sweep the towers and down into the canyon. Bartholomew expects to encounter the snipers stuck in place, but Levi and Drasa have already left the towers. They drive the Jeep with its winch to ascend the service road while fighting off Hollow Men who try to drag them back. The creatures are numerous; they bite at boot leather and crawl into engine bays to short out vehicle systems. At one choke point, a Hollow Man claws through the tire, and Levi slashes its throat with a bayonet. They fight for hours and make slow, brutal progress.

Realizing their only hope is to remove the cloaking jammers that protect the site, Levi and Drasa fight back toward the rim. They rig explosives on the jamming towers, taking time to set charges under fire from drones and Darklake's men. When Bartholomew and her team arrive at the empty towers, they find only silence and abandoned equipment. As her men search the perimeter, the charges Levi and Drasa set detonate, destroying the satellite jammers and severing the cloaking field. The moment the jammers fall, Straydog--a long‑hidden failsafe missile--loses its remote safety; its automated launch sequence recognizes the loss of jamming as protocol breach. A missile ascends from hidden silos, slams into the gorge, and the warhead detonates in a blinding fireball. The blast consumes the Hollow Men in a shockwave of heat and radiation and obliterates Bartholomew's strike team and her command element on the rim. The canyon collapses in a rolling pyre; vegetation and hybrid bodies combust.

Levi and Drasa, who had intended to be clear of the blast by disrupting the jammers, suffer the blast's aftereffects despite their precautions. They take shelter behind a rock overhang; the concussion rips at their lungs, and they collapse, coughing ash. When the dust settles and the silence returns, they realize the nuclear failsafe has demolished the gorge and everything in it. They have no evidence left to hand to the world except stolen data and a burning memory. The detonation kills the Hollow Men, kills Bartholomew and all of her team outright, and destroys enough of the facility to halt the immediate threat of Darklake's experiments.

In the immediate aftermath, Levi and Drasa separate by choice to ensure they have not acquired late‑onset mutations from the contaminant; they agree to a five‑day quarantine apart. Drasa hikes to a rendezvous point in France, following coordinates and a promise. Levi, wounded and delayed by an injury, does not meet her at the appointed time. He leaves her instead a folded envelope with the completed poem he has been writing and a note that reads, "If I don't make it, open at sunset." He tells himself he is coming, but the injury and the chaos from the blast slow him. Drasa waits for him at a seaside resort for several days; when Levi finally arrives some months later, he is alive and uninfected. They embrace, kiss, and begin to leave the canyon's story behind them.

The film traces the arc of Darklake's crimes through the bunker footage and through Bartholomew's terse phone calls, revealing the extent of the corporate cover‑up: the company posed as the government agency overseeing the gorge while it maintained a live incubator for hybrid research. The archival reels show the initial experiments in the 1940s, the earthquake that freed the fog, and the failure to contain the mutagen. Modern logs show that the corporation continued experiments in secrecy and used the Straydog protocol as an insurance policy to destroy the evidence if their control ever slipped.

Several smaller, personal deaths punctuate the story along the way. J.D. dies after being picked up by helicopter on Bartholomew's orders; the execution comes as a single, administrative response to the risk of a loose mouth. The Hollow Men--soldiers and civilians exposed to the fog decades ago--die en masse in the missile detonation that Levi and Drasa trigger by destroying the jammers. The Darklake strike team and Bartholomew herself are consumed in the same detonation; their personnel are killed by the explosion and the resulting collapse of the gorge infrastructure.

Throughout their ordeal, Levi's nightmares and Drasa's grief for her father shape their actions. Erikas carries out his planned suicide on the date he chose; Drasa receives word of his death while she is still on post, and his decision deepens her resolve to survive. Levi's repeated nightmares become less raw as he finds a partner in Drasa; their intimacy grows from notes across the canyon into a shared determination to expose the truth and to live beyond it.

Months after the detonation, with the immediate hazard neutralized and the canyon site destroyed to the point that it cannot serve as a continuing lab, Levi and Drasa reunite at the seaside resort. Drasa has already settled into an ordinary rhythm--working as a waitress at a restaurant, tending to simple customers and small tasks--while waiting to see if Levi will return. Levi finally appears, explaining a delay caused by recovery from his injuries. The two stand on a windswept terrace; Levi hands Drasa the envelope marked for sunset. She opens it and reads his words aloud. They embrace and kiss, closing the film on their reunion as survivors who have destroyed the facility that spawned the Hollow Men, eliminated the private corporation's immediate ability to weaponize the mutagen, and pledged a future together free of the canyon's secret.

The narrative thus moves from quiet watchtower routines and the slow build of intimacy into open combat, discovery of archival horrors in a buried bunker, a corporate conspiracy revealed, and the decisive destruction of the gorge by a nuclear fail‑safe triggered when Levi and Drasa remove the system that hid the site. Deaths are precise: J.D. executed by Bartholomew's order, Hollow Men killed by the missile detonation, Bartholomew and her strike team obliterated in the same blast, and Erikas dying by his own choice. Levi and Drasa endure the fall into the gorge, the fights with hybrid creatures, the parachute landings, the stress of enforced separation for quarantine, and finally the reunion that closes the film. The final image is the two of them together at sunset, alive, uninfected, and holding the record of what happened in the ruined gorge.

The ending of The Gorge (2025) reveals that Levi and Drasa, two elite snipers guarding opposite sides of a secret gorge, eventually breach the strict isolation protocols and venture into the gorge together. Inside, they discover grotesque humanoid creatures called the Hollow Men, mutants created by failed secret experiments. When a wave of these creatures attempts to break free, Levi falls into the gorge. Drasa descends to save him, and together they confront the horrifying truth behind the gorge's dark past and ongoing experiments conducted by a private defense company. They survive the ordeal and the movie concludes on their united strength and the shared understanding of the dangers contained within the gorge.

Narrated scene-by-scene in detail:

The film builds tension through Levi and Drasa's isolation, each stationed in heavily fortified towers on opposite sides of a deep, cloaked gorge. Initially forbidden to communicate, Drasa breaks protocol on her birthday by signaling to Levi, sparking a written exchange and a sharpshooting contest between them. This contact softens their guarded demeanors, and they develop a bond despite the enforced solitude.

As months pass, their communication escalates. Levi sneaks across the gorge using a zipline to meet Drasa on her side. Their meeting is marked by a shared meal and dancing--a rare moment of warmth and connection contrasting the grimness of their roles as guards against an unknown menace.

Suddenly, monstrous humanoid creatures known as Hollow Men surge up from the gorge trying to escape containment. Levi and Drasa spring into defense, expertly using their rifles, automated turrets, and mines to hold the creatures at bay. The assault is chaotic and relentless, underscoring the lethal stakes of their mission.

During the chaos, Levi falls into the gorge as a series of mines detonate. Drasa immediately descends after him, venturing into the dark, eerie depths where the monstrous Hollow Men roam. Inside the gorge, they explore and find an abandoned research facility. Through their investigation, they learn that this facility was previously run jointly by Western and Eastern governments but now belongs to Dark Lake, a private defense corporation. The company continued experiments to create super soldiers by exposing humans to hazardous chemicals trapped in the gorge after a seismic event decades prior, explaining the grotesque fusion of humans and flora/fauna seen in the Hollow Men.

Scene by scene, the movie meticulously reveals the mystery: first, the forbidding solitude and strict orders to prevent contact; then, the slow humanization of Levi and Drasa through forbidden communication and mutual support; followed by the unexpected mass escape attempt by the Hollow Men; and finally, the descent into the gorge where the pair face monstrosity and uncover cold corporate secrets. The ending emphasizes humanity's resilience and determination as Levi and Drasa survive, united in purpose against a threat born from scientific hubris and secrecy.

This conclusion ties the personal struggles of both characters--Levi's PTSD and Drasa's emotional loss--into the greater narrative about containment, trust, and confronting monstrous legacies, all set against a claustrophobic, desperate battleground inside the gorge.

Yes, the movie The Gorge (2025) does have a post-credit scene. After the main story concludes with the two mercenaries surviving and reuniting at a restaurant following their plan, the post-credit scene features a cryptic, atmospheric sequence with dialogue such as "Nothing's in color. I cross the desert. Nothing's alive," and references to heat and a black dot, creating a mysterious and haunting tone. This scene appears to be abstract and symbolic rather than a straightforward continuation of the plot.

The post-credit scene does not show additional narrative closure but instead leaves a lingering, enigmatic impression related to the film's themes.

The Hollow Men are monstrous creatures contained within the gorge, which is guarded by two elite snipers. They emerge from the depths of the gorge and are the primary threat the snipers must defend against using rifles, automated turrets, and mines. The gorge is kept hidden by powerful cloaking antennas, and the creatures are so dangerous that battalions sent into the gorge in the 1940s never returned. The creatures are named after T.S. Eliot's poem, but their exact origin remains mysterious within the story.

Levi and Drasa, guarding opposite sides of the gorge, initially have no direct contact due to strict no-communication orders. However, Drasa breaks protocol on her birthday by initiating communication through written signs and a sharpshooting competition. Over several months, they bond from afar through long-distance exchanges such as playing music loudly, drunkenly dancing, remotely playing chess, and eventually a zipline allows Levi to physically cross the gorge for an intimate evening with Drasa before an accident separates them again.

Bartholomew is a mysterious woman who recruits Levi Kane to guard the west tower of the gorge. She is the head of the secret operation overseeing the mission. Bartholomew orders the killing of Levi's predecessor, J.D., who believed he was being exfiltrated but was instead eliminated on her orders. The story raises questions about Bartholomew's true intentions and whether she is alive or dead, adding to the intrigue surrounding the secret operation.

After Levi uses a zipline to cross the gorge for an intimate evening with Drasa, a landmine explosion snaps the cable, causing Levi to fall into the fog-shrouded canyon below. Drasa immediately parachutes after him, leading to their exploration of the dangerous and mysterious 'lost world' within the gorge, where they face unknown threats and uncover deeper secrets about their mission.

The emergency protocol 'Straydog' is a warning given by J.D., Levi's predecessor, about an unknown contingency related to the gorge mission. While details are scarce, it implies a critical and possibly deadly response to emergencies within the gorge. This protocol adds tension and mystery to the mission, highlighting the high stakes and dangers faced by the snipers guarding the gorge.

"The Gorge" (2025) is not family-friendly. Here are some potentially objectionable or upsetting elements that might be concerning for children or sensitive viewers:

• Violence and Action: The film includes intense action sequences, such as characters shooting their way through enemies, which results in painful injuries.
• Language: The movie contains profanity, including the use of the f-word once, the s-word seven times, "h--" six times, and single uses of "b--ch" and "d--n".
• Substance Use: Characters drink alcohol and reference prescription medication.
• Nudity and Suggestive Content: There is a brief scene showing a man's naked rear, and some sexual activity is implied.
• Horror Elements: The film features psychological and visceral scares, which might be distressing for sensitive viewers.

Overall, given these elements, it is advisable for viewers to exercise caution, especially when considering younger or more sensitive audiences.

Based on the available search results, there is no evidence that a dog dies in the movie The Gorge (2025). The plot summaries and descriptions focus on the survival struggle of two elite operatives, Levi and Drasa, as they defend against grotesque humanoid creatures known as "The Hollow Men" within a mysterious gorge. None of the detailed plot overviews, including character interactions and key events, mention a dog or the death of a dog in the film.

If you are concerned specifically about animal harm, there is no indication from credible sources that such a scene occurs in The Gorge (2025).