Apex: Charlize Theron vs. the Australian Outback

Luca Fontana

8.5.2026

Translation: Natalie McKay

Apex is currently at the top of the Netflix film charts. That might say more about our collective longing for a simple adrenaline rush than about the quality of the film itself.

Don’t worry: the following film review doesn’t contain any spoilers. I won’t tell you anything that isn’t already known or shown in the trailers. Apex is available on Netflix.

Baltasar Kormákur isn’t a director who strives to be original. He’s looking for thrills – and finds them in his films. With Everest, a star-studded mountaineering drama released in 2015, he proved he can distill real-life settings and physical danger into cinema that stays with you long after the credits roll.

With Apex, he does the same thing, only in a more compact, direct way – and this time, not with the world’s highest mountain as the backdrop, but the Australian bush. So if you’re familiar with his work, you’ll know what to expect: no surprises in the story or drama, but cinematography that’s second to none.

What’s Apex about?

Sasha (Charlize Theron) is a mountaineer and adrenaline junkie – the kind of person who scales cliffs that give others a fear of heights just by looking at them. When her partner Tommy (Eric Bana) dies during a climbing expedition on the notorious Troll Wall in Norway, she retreats to Australia to put some distance – and a few time zones – between herself and her trauma.

While searching for her next adrenaline rush, a park ranger at a remote filling station warns her that people have disappeared without a trace in this area; not even their bodies have been found. As if on cue, Ben (Taron Egerton) comes onto the scene – a local who sells homemade beef jerky at filling station convenience stores and gives Sasha a recommendation for a particularly secluded spot. Sasha doesn’t need a second invitation.

But what she doesn’t know is that the spot’s Ben’s personal hunting ground – and it’s not animals he’s after. What follows is a game of cat and mouse through the Australian wilderness. That’s all the story the film needs. That’s all the story the film wants. And running for just over 90 minutes, the film couldn’t possibly pack in more of a story anyway.

Kormákur, the craftsman

The biggest compliment I can pay Apex is it’s B-movie material with an A-movie budget. What I mean by this is that director Kormákur doesn’t waste any time on self-reflection or in-depth character development. The film has a premise and sticks to it. No detours, no meta level, no desire to be anything more than a well-crafted thriller. But wow, this film looks great.

I can tell that right from the start, even before Ben shows up. Kormákur summons a sense of unease through the sweaty hunters at the filling station who harass Sasha, through the claustrophobic confines of a small-town setting and through the feeling that the grieving mountaineer’s out of place here from the very beginning. This carefully crafted atmosphere really hits the mark.

And then there are the settings. Apex was filmed in New South Wales, and you can tell: endless landscapes seen from a bird’s eye view, real cliffs, real bush, real water. Whenever computer-generated effects are used – such as when the camera follows Sasha as she plunges headfirst off a cliff – they’re so seamlessly integrated that I have to look twice.

Kormákur already had a track record of this with Everest: he doesn’t just want to simulate the threat; he wants to literally capture it on camera. In an era when streaming productions often have us staring at green-screen walls instead of taking on the costs, effort and logistics involved in an elaborate shoot in the bush, this is by no means a given.

What the trailer doesn’t show is that Apex is actually more hard-hitting at times than you’d expect. There’s a reason it’s rated FSK 16 in Germany. There are moments that feel less like a survival thriller and more like a horror movie – scenes that made me flinch. I didn’t see that coming after the tame marketing campaign. Kormákur doesn’t pull any punches. I like that.

The problem? Ben

Taron Egerton’s one of my favourite actors of recent years. I don’t say that lightly. Since his breakthrough in the Kingsman films, he’s demonstrated his unsurpassed range: from Rocketman, Eddie the Eagle and Tetris, through to Black Bird and, most recently, Smoke. He’s someone I always enjoy watching on TV or on the big screen.

In Apex, however, I had mixed feelings about him. Not because his acting’s bad – on the contrary. In the later parts of the film, when Ben reveals his true colours and the plot demands that side of him, Egerton’s simply brilliant. The problem lies at the beginning.

At first, Ben’s supposed to come across as someone you might not entirely trust, but who you’d still answer the door for. Instead, from the very first scene, he gives off an energy that sets all my alarm bells ringing. Not charmingly eccentric, but downright creepy. A man who sells «homemade» beef jerky at filling stations and raises so many red flags that you’d be better off heading straight to the next town.

I could overlook this if Sasha were the kind of person to miss these signals. But she isn’t. She assesses risks and analyses situations – that’s what she’s all about. The fact that she, of all people, would fall for Ben just doesn’t seem believable. The script forces her into a naivety that doesn’t suit her.

I think if Egerton seemed even slightly more like a regular guy at the start of the film, as is the case with similar characters in better thrillers, the deception would’ve worked. Instead, in these moments the script treats Sasha as if she were an ordinary tourist rather than the seasoned adventurer the film had previously established her to be.

Luca Fontana

Senior Editor

Luca.Fontana@digitecgalaxus.ch

I write about technology as if it were cinema, and about films as if they were real life. Between bits and blockbusters, I’m after stories that move people, not just generate clicks. And yes – sometimes I listen to film scores louder than I probably should.

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