While some movies benefit from a cozy, low-stakes home viewing environment, others would undoubtedly be improved seeing them in a packed midnight 3D screening. From the moment Apex opens with a trippy shot of Charlize Theron’s rock climber Sasha peering straight down an icy Norwegian rock wall from a tent suspended in midair, it’s clear cinematographer Lawrence Sher’s wondrous depictions of the natural world would be much better suited to the big screen than whatever audiences are streaming it on via Netflix. The real loss, however, is the lack of a raucous crowd to scream and gasp at each new twist and turn taken by a survival thriller that starts solidly enough before gleefully careening of a cliff thanks in no small part to an absolutely wackadoo performance from Taron Egerton.
In fact, Apex is like a sampler platter of the recent slate of survival thrillers from Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur. As with the Shailene Woodley/Sam Claflin vehicle Adrift, there’s a touch of romantic drama as Sasha and her climbing partner Tommy (Eric Bana) brave the elements together, making life-or-death decisions about when they should push each other forward and when they should hang back. As with Everest, Kormákur is interested in the psyche of thrill-seekers and what happens when their adventurous ways have fatal consequences. And as with his Idris Elba vs. A Lion thriller, Beast, Kormákur’s not afraid to throw some B-movie energy into the mix either—sometimes for better, but often for worse.
As Apex catches up with Sasha on a solo kayaking trip through the Australian Outback, it initially finds a refreshing new angle on the survival thriller genre. Sasha has sworn off partnership, preferring to thrill-seek on her own so she’s not responsible for anyone else’s life and no one is responsible for hers. Yet Jeremy Robbins’ script smartly realizes that this kind of solo adventuring is very different for women than it is for men. Sasha doesn’t just have to think about surviving the elements, she has to think about surviving the men she encounters along the way—including a group of rowdy hunters who go out of their way to make her feel uncomfortable at a gas station.
Apex has a keen eye for the sort of subtle boundary-pushing pretty much every woman has had to navigate at some point in her life. The hunters purposefully brush past Sasha in the aisles and excuse their invasive questioning under the guise of “just being nice.” When she encounters them out in the wilderness later, she has to make snap decisions about how best to protect herself: either return their faux friendliness and risk putting herself in a dangerous position, or ignore them and risk inciting their anger. Kormákur mines effective tension from a world where whitewater rapids are a relaxing vacation compared to the exhausting hypervigilance of everyday womanhood.
At first, Egerton’s friendly local Ben seems to be a counterpoint to those harrowing gender dynamics. He proves “not all men” by sticking up for Sasha when he sees the hunters messing with her. Yet his nice guy demeanor is about 10 percent off in a way that raises subtle red flags of its own. Unfortunately, it turns out subtlety isn’t what Apex is actually after. As Sasha’s journey takes her to an especially isolated national park, the film becomes less of a survival thriller than a full-on campy horror flick. Without giving all the specifics away, Apex winds up evoking everything from The Hunger Games to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with Egerton giving a performance that feels like he watched James McAvoy in Split and thought “I can do that.”
There’s fun to be had watching Theron rock climb for her life while Egerton chews the Australian scenery like it’s a Bloomin’ Onion. It’s just that, ironically, Apex is a whole lot scarier when it’s existing within the realm of reality than when it goes full Most Dangerous Game. While the two leads are physically and emotionally game for everything the film asks of them, Robbins’ screenplay spends so much time dreaming up rock- and river-based survival set pieces that it fails to give Sasha and Ben a particularly interesting dynamic with one another—even though most of its 96 minutes hinges on their cat-and-mouse dynamic. In fact, Ben’s motivations are so strange and specific, the majority of the film has nothing to do with the gender dynamics of its opening act, even if this is sort of a story about why you should pick the bear over the man.
Indeed, it’s telling that Sasha’s brief encounters with the hunters are more layered than anything that happens between her and Ben. Apex mistakes going bigger for going better when what it really needs is a little more cleverness, either in how Ben operates or how Sasha tries to survive her impossible scenario. For a movie with some pretty ridiculous plot swerves, everything winds up feeling oddly straightforward, which makes the survival genre’s requisite catharsis and comeuppance land anticlimactically. With the right group of fellow viewers around, Apex could play like gangbusters in a “you have to see it to believe it” way. But without that, it’s a mountain trip that risks landing with a thud.
Director: Baltasar Kormákur
Writer: Jeremy Robbins
Starring: Charlize Theron, Taron Egerton, Eric Bana
Release Date: April 24, 2026 (Netflix)
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