So Apex opens on the Troll Wall in Norway. Charlize Theron and Eric Bana, harnessed up, weather rolling in. The camera looks down. You feel it in your stomach. Honestly, this is the kind of opening that should be playing in front of 400 people in a dark room, not on whatever screen you happen to have nearby. Netflix bought it. That’s the deal. Director Baltasar Kormákur has been at this game for years now, between Everest and Beast, and the man knows what he’s doing with mountains and animals and weather.
Apex Plot: A Grieving Climber Hunted in the Australian Outback
So here’s the gist. Sasha climbs for a living. Tommy is her partner, played by Bana in what amounts to about eight minutes of screen time (sorry, but more would’ve been nice). The Troll Wall ascent goes wrong. Tommy doesn’t make it. Five months pass. Sasha is wrecked, can’t sleep, blames herself, and decides solo-tripping into the Australian bush is the cure. Spoiler: it isn’t. She runs into Ben, played by Taron Egerton, at some dusty gas station, and Ben is trouble. You can see that coming from a mile off. The film knows you can. It’s not really trying to hide the ball, it’s trying to make the chase work anyway.
Charlize Theron Delivers Apex’s Most Physical Performance Since Mad Max
Look, Theron has been a physical actor since Aeon Flux. Twenty-five-ish years of it. Apex might be the gnarliest thing she’s done since strapping into Furiosa’s rig in Mad Max: Fury Road. She’s nearly fifty in this. You can see it. That’s a feature, not a bug. Sasha falls and the falls actually look like they cost her something. She runs and gets winded. There’s a sequence with a bear trap and a freezing river, and I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s brutal. Two, maybe three actors her age would even attempt this. Theron just does it.
Egerton, the other half of this two-hander, takes the opposite road. Big, broad, smiling-while-he’s-talking-about-skinning-someone kind of villain. Some critics hated it. AV Club called the performance unhinged. Yeah, it is. It’s supposed to be. The third act needs Ben monstrous enough that we’re rooting for Sasha to actually go after him, not just away from him. Egerton sells that flip.
Baltasar Kormákur and Lawrence Sher Bring Cinematic Polish to Apex
Lawrence Sher shot this. The Troll Wall stuff alone is worth your time. Then there’s a canyon descent later that’s gorgeous and terrifying in equal measure, and the way the bush keeps shifting from “tourism brochure” to “you are going to die here” is real cinematography work, not just pretty pictures.
Jeremy Robbins wrote the script, his first feature, and what he leaves out matters as much as what he puts in. Ninety-five minutes, no fat. No therapist scenes. No long flashback to childhood trauma. No monologue under stars. Sasha is sad, we get it, the movie moves on. I wish more thrillers had this kind of discipline.
Influences? Sure. Cliffhanger a little. The River Wild a lot. Wolf Creek in mood. The Most Dangerous Game in structure. A drop of Deliverance later on. Kormákur isn’t doing anything new here. He’s just doing it competently, which in 2026 counts for plenty.
Apex’s Cannibal Twist: Bold Swing or Cheap Shock?
Okay, here’s where the film loses people. Halfway through, the reveal: Ben is a cannibal. Not a metaphorical cannibal. A literal one, with a meat operation on the side. The movie shifts gear and gets nastier. Stephanie Zacharek over at Time thought it was sadistic. Guy Lodge at Variety felt the opposite, that the movie earned the ugliness.
Putting myself somewhere between those two but closer to Lodge. The reveal isn’t out of nowhere; the movie tells you it’s coming. Kormákur uses it to escalate, not to wallow. But yeah, the meat-hook stuff feels imported from a darker, meaner film, and there are a couple of beats where the camera is clearly going for the wince more than the gasp. How you feel about that swing is going to decide where you land on the whole movie.
So, Is Apex Worth Watching on Netflix?
Yeah, I think so. With a but. Apex is a Netflix original that actually feels like a movie, which is rarer than it should be. Theron is locked in, Egerton goes for it, Kormákur knows mountains and humans and how they interact badly. Ninety-five minutes is the right length. The cannibal pivot is the gamble, and your mileage will vary.
The film deserved a theater. The couch is what it gets.
Data sources: FilmDB.co.uk and TMDb. Availability of information may vary, and accuracy is not guaranteed.