Grief, agony, desperation, and personal redemption — these are powerful tools in the hands of the right artist. But it’s never enough to present relatable suffering like bereavement, emotional anguish, and resilience in the face of overwhelming odds; you have to say something about them. So, climb, grieve, endure, survive — those are the basic building blocks of “Apex,” but, failing to do anything more than present those ideas, the Netflix survival thriller from director Baltasar Kormákur ends up aggressively average and ultimately unable to scale any real cinematic heights.
And to overanalyze a film usually does a disservice to what it’s really trying to do or say, but in the case of “Apex,” it at least gives one something more to say than that this survival drama in the dangerous Australian wilderness is nothing more than that. To that end, one can’t help but think of its star, Charlize Theron’s recent New York Times interview, an incredibly intimate, vulnerable, brave conversation where the actress candidly discussed her traumatic upbringing and the theme that, ultimately, she can take care of herself on her own.
And yes, Theron is rather extraordinarily capable, as the movie shows, which perhaps explains her shift into the action genre as a badass femme fatale of late — but to what end? A lot of torture at the hands of a sociopath, all to gesture toward some idea of strength forged through trauma. But “Apex” does those narratives no favors; it borrows their shape, their agony, and their scars without earning the meaning that usually gives them weight.
Theron plays a woman still reeling five months after the death of her husband, played by Eric Bana, who died in a tragic mountain-climbing accident, which she believes is her fault. Still swallowed by grief and clearly searching for something she cannot quite name, she heads into the Australian wilderness alone, ignoring warnings along the way. Wandarra National Park is the kind of place rangers caution people against entering solo. People disappear, get lost, and are swallowed by terrain and bad judgment. The film initially understands the appeal of that danger to someone in pain. This is not quite a healing journey and not exactly an act of self-destruction either, but something blurrier and more wounded in between.
That early stretch works well enough. Theron gives the character a bruised, hollowed-out quality that suggests someone flirting with risk because ordinary life has stopped making much sense. Kormákur, at first, seems interested in that tension. “Apex” opens like a rock-climbing drama with real psychological undertow, the kind of stripped-down survival story that might connect physical peril to emotional collapse. But once the film introduces Taron Egerton’s character and tips its hand, it becomes something much more basic and much less interesting.
It quickly turns into a melange of “The Most Dangerous Game” meets “Free Solo,” with some “Deliverance” mixed in, but without the depth, tension, or psychological bite to make that combination compelling.
Egerton plays the kind of slick, unstable psychopath the movie seems to think is inherently fascinating. Still, there isn’t enough going on beneath the surface for him to register as anything more than a plot device with a rifle. He gives Theron’s character a running start and then begins hunting her through the outback, apparently because he believes she “likes danger,” which is the kind of half-baked motivation that sounds like it was meant to land as twisted insight and instead sits there like a lazy screenwriting shortcut. From that point on, the movie more or less abandons its interest in grief, trauma, and the reckless impulse to push oneself to the edge, and becomes a chase-cum-survival film that keeps circling the same beats.
Now, between “Adrift” — survive the sea — “Everest” — survive the avalanche — “The Deep” — survive the ocean depths — and “Beast” — survive an unconvincing-looking CGI lion — Kormákur has never met a survival film he didn’t love. He knows how to stage bodies under pressure. But as “Apex” kicks into high gear, it flattens out. The hunt is excruciatingly dull, cycling through the same buttons — run, hide, scramble, fight, repeat — and a brief twist only confirms how little there was under the surface.
Theron remains the film’s main asset. She brings gravity and bruised conviction to material that rarely deserves it, still suggesting a woman whose grief has curdled into something self-punishing. You can feel a better version of “Apex” hovering around her performance. Egerton, meanwhile, is stuck playing a villain so broad and underwritten he feels like he wandered in from a different, dumber movie. He is just psychotic because the movie needs him to be.
Eventually, the tables turn, at least somewhat. There is a fight, a mortal injury, and a shift in control that forces the two into a more complicated survival situation. In theory, that should give the film a second wind. In practice, it only underlines how mechanically the whole thing has been assembled. The inevitable cooperation, the eventual comeuppance, and the final push toward redemption all land with a thud. “Apex” wants transcendence out of a story it has spent most of its runtime treating like disposable thriller pulp.
There is a real movie buried inside “Apex,” one about grief curdling into recklessness, about danger as a seductive form of self-erasure, about survival not as triumph but as a stubborn obligation. Kormákur brushes against that film in the opening act and then abandons it for something rote. By the end, “Apex” has put its protagonist through enormous punishment without giving that suffering much shape, meaning, or dramatic payoff. Most importantly, its final gestures toward catharsis are nowhere near as cathartic or moving as the movie believes they are.
Theron can survive almost anything onscreen. “Apex” proves, once again, that she can carry weak material farther than most actors. It also proves that even she cannot quite drag a dull survival programmer up the mountain. [C-]
