DENVER — If you want to spend a night in the company of swooning lovers, Denver native Scott Derrickson would like to show you his new Apple TV+ movie, “The Gorge.”

And if you’re looking for panic-inducing mystery and action? “The Gorge” has those, too.

The movie, which premiered on Apple TV+ on Feb. 14, is a hybrid romance-horror starring Miles Teller (“Top Gun: Maverick”), Anya Taylor-Joy (“The Menu”) and Sigourney Weaver (everything good) as operatives in a high-concept scheme that unfurls like a blood-stained blanket.

Director Derrickson, known for blockbusters such as Marvel’s “Doctor Strange” and the horror hits “Sinister” and “The Black Phone,” admitted it’s an unusual approach to a love story — especially one released on Valentine’s Day. But the mix of vulnerability and terror fits with the times.

“That’s what I think is interesting about the script and, ultimately, (it’s) the reason I made the movie,” said the 58-year-old, who grew up reading his mother’s 1970s book reviews done while a freelance writer for The Denver Post while working as a delivery boy for the paper in North Denver. “The innovation and ambition of blending genres in such a seemingly effortless way was really done well.”

Derrickson now lives in Los Angeles.

In “The Gorge,” Teller and Taylor-Joy play elite snipers who are recruited to live in guard towers on either side of a fog-shrouded gorge for one year. Their recruiter, Sigourney Weaver, won’t tell them what they’re guarding — only that they can’t let it escape the gorge — and their rotation begins sleepily enough.

That doesn’t last. Suddenly out of their element in a wide-open wilderness that is never specified — even to the protagonists — the film teases out the same feelings with which our characters grapple. When they start communicating via hand-written signs, viewed only through binoculars, a new dynamic takes shape and their love grows.

But that’s not all. The movie’s tagline reads: “The world’s most dangerous secret lies between them,” which works for both the plot and the themes of uncertainty, forced isolation, connection, and survival. Screenwriter Zach Dean did that intentionally, Derrickson said, since the script was written during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It really is a movie about two lonely, isolated individuals finding each other and fighting hard to be together,” Derrickson said. “They’re so wary in their profession because they have to be. But if they didn’t have this distance they’d probably never open up to each other. There’s safety for them to engage with that person in a way they normally wouldn’t.”

Derrickson had just fallen in love and gotten married before getting the script, he said, so the romantic themes resonated with him. The music is the “emotional tell” of the movie, as he put it, not the clever, special effects-driven action or its explosive third act.

“That’s embedded in the core in themes that (composers) Trent (Reznor) and Atticus (Ross) did,” he said. “That real sense of existential isolation giving way to pervasive danger.”

Nine Inch Nails leader Reznor and British composer Ross are Oscar winners and longtime musical partners who bring a confident hum of electricity, cranking it up and down when necessary. The horror of the unexpected is something Derrickson has embraced, having grown up in what he called a violent, working-class neighborhood.

Five years ago, he shared an image of his North Denver childhood home on Instagram with the message: “The mother of my friend next door was murdered when I was seven. This is where all the horror films come from.”

That “creepiness” drives his career, he said, but so does his time in Colorado’s climate. For “The Gorge” in particular, he was inspired by the turn-on-a-dime weather he experienced while growing up here, which connected to his love of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s work.

“There’s direct inspiration in Italian horror and Dario Argento, with the fog and mist, but my favorite director is Kurosawa and I teach a course (at Biola University in La Mirada, California) on him,” he said. “The presence of weather in his movies is more dominant than in any filmography. You have to have lived in Colorado to understand that distinctiveness and how potent it is and how fast things seem to transition.”

“The Gorge” takes place in a forest that was realized partly through location shoots, and partly through sound stage sets. As is often said of movie settings, it’s a character in its own right. But the natural elements aren’t always meant to be threatening, given the movie’s unusual blend of tones.

“The volatility of weather, the absence of weather, the seasons affecting your body — so much of that comes from knowing what it feels like in the mountains,” he said. “I’ve hiked Pikes Peak and I know these environments. Part of the attraction in (this project) was to create a sense of place where you have the isolation and the calmness and quietness — even with what’s in the gorge. It’s that Rocky Mountain peace I felt as a teenager going hiking in the summer.”

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