Sometimes it’s quite easy to imagine a version of how trailers get made – because it’s not exactly rocket science. Shots and scenes from a movie get sent to a specialist editor, who chops them up in more or less inventive ways to sell people the movie in as little time as possible.
Other times, though, it’s a little more baffling, and that’s how I’d describe Apple TV+’s latest promo for The Gorge, its latest original movie, which rocketed to the top of its movie chart when it came out on 14 February. The romance was timed to come out on Valentine’s Day, and now its leads Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller have starred in a fairly bizarre little trailer.
The theme is ASMR, or “autonomous sensory meridian response”, which has become the go-to acronym for those funny tingles you can sometimes get down your spine when certain noises hit your ears. Not everyone feels it, it can be pretty funny to hear about, and I can’t figure out why on earth Apple thought it was perfect for The Gorge.
Either way, the teaser sees Taylor-Joy and Teller being very game about the whole thing, opening up a bag full of goodies that tie into moments in the film, and rustling them or clicking them to make them work as ASMR props. The extent to which either of them really knows what ASMR is might be variable, but Taylor-Joy for one certainly seems to give it her all.
Crucially, this trailer barely features anything at all to give you any info about the movie itself, which is a kooky horror-romance hybrid that puts the two main characters on either side of a gorge that occasionally spews demons. It’s completely ludicrous, of course, but with charismatic lead actors there’s plenty of fun to be had with it.
Still, you’ll probably need to watch at least one other trailer for it to actually know what to expect, so Apple’s probably assuming that this’ll just be supporting content (and hoping that it goes viral). I can’t say it’s all that persuasive, but it’s still among the weirder promos I’ve seen in a while – maybe some of the other best streaming services will take notes.
