Synopsis: A grieving woman testing her limits in the Australian wilderness is suddenly ensnared in a deadly game with a ruthless predator.
Stars: Charlize Theron, Taron Egerton, Eric Bana
Director: Baltasar Kormákur
Rated: R
Running Length: 95 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Baltasar Kormákur’s Netflix survival thriller has Charlize Theron, Taron Egerton, and an Australian landscape in its favor and a grim seriousness and iffy CGI working against it. Egerton is the real reason to watch.
Apex Review: Summit Assembly Required
Timing is everything in Hollywood, and Apex arrives at a tricky moment. Sam Raimi’s Send Help landed earlier this year as one of 2026’s first genuine genre pleasures, and while Baltasar Kormákur‘s new Netflix thriller isn’t working from the same playbook exactly, the DNA overlap is hard to ignore: resourceful woman, hostile paradise, a man who wants her dead, the elements conspiring on both sides. The difference is tone. Send Help had crackle and a wink; Apex plays it straight-faced to the point of gloom. That’s not automatically a problem. It just means the film has to work harder to justify its mood — and Apex only gets there in flashes.
Theron Reaches, Egerton Delivers
Sasha (Charlize Theron, Fazt X) is a rock climber moving through a grief she’s trying to outrun. She lands in the rugged wilderness of New South Wales hoping solitude will do what therapy hasn’t, and what she finds instead is Ben (Taron Egerton, Rocketman), a hunter who doesn’t think of himself as a cruel killer. He does offer his prey a head start while he grooves to naughty tune, after all. Eric Bana (Untamed) appears as Tommy, Sasha’s climbing partner, in the emotional architecture the film builds around her. And that’s about all I’ll say about how Bana figures into the story.
Theron remains among the most reliable stars working, and she’s more engaged here than she was in 2025’s stinker The Old Guard 2. But Apex asks less of her than the premise suggests. The first act lingers on Sasha kayaking downriver and getting ogled by Outback locals (would it kill a thriller set in Australia to put literally anyone in a convenience store besides a leering man in a trucker hat?), and when the action kicks in, it trades invention for endurance. Theron plays vulnerability beautifully — it is one of her most underutilized registers — but the script doesn’t give her much to spar with once the chase begins.
Egerton is the surprise. He’s spent recent years taking on every accent but his own with mixed results, but his Australian here is mostly solid, and more importantly, he commits to Ben’s accute weirdness from frame one. There’s no slow reveal of Ben’s depravity. Kormákur (Contraband) has Egerton play Ben as strange and dangerous from the opening scene, which turns out to be the right call.
The Visuals Clash With Themselves
I did get frustrated with Apex as it trekked further into inland. It was shot on location in Sydney and New South Wales, and the real landscapes are stunning. But the film also leans heavily on green screen and digital background enhancement, and the line between real and enhanced is visible in ways that keep pulling you out. Whether Theron is scaling a cliff face or careening down rapids, there’s a digitized quality to the chase that blunts the immediacy. I miss the days when practical stunts looked practical even when they were shot in a studio tank. For a film marketed on the physicality of its stars performing their own work, that’s a real trade-off.
Cinematographer Lawrence Sher (Joker) is a strong hire, and his framing is sharp throughout — the VFX issues aren’t on him. Editor Sigurður Eyþórsson handles the cat-and-mouse cuts with an instinct for when to show the hunter and when to follow the hunted. Composer Högni Egilsson scores with restraint, letting silence do the work when the chase demands it. Costume designer Margot Wilson deserves credit for dressing the leads in gear that matches their implied skill level and income. However, I should point out that Egerton spends a decent amount of screen time in little to no costume at all.
A Weekend-Night Thriller That Knows Its Lane
This is a pure Friday-night movie. That’s not a diss. There’s craft here, commitment from the leads, and a 95-minute runtime that doesn’t oversell itself. Pair it with Send Help for the year’s unofficial “woman outwits monstrous man in paradise” double feature, or bookend it with Atomic Blonde for Theron and She Rides Shotgun for Egerton if you want to make a night of it.
Sure, Apex doesn’t clear the peak it’s aiming for. But it puts on a respectable climb, and when Egerton is on screen doing his thing, you can feel what the film might have been with a little more humor in its bones. Sometimes half a summit is enough.
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