Netflix’s “Apex” Review: Charlize Theron Climbs, Crawls & Survives Taron Egerton’s Bird Screams

Sometimes, the most dangerous hobbies come with a waiver, billions in insurance policies, and a quiet understanding that things could go horribly wrong at any moment in time. Cave diving. Big wave surfing. Hang gliding. Free solo climbing. These are the kinds of activities that make insurance companies sweat and loved ones beg you to simply pick up knitting instead. But for adrenaline junkies, that’s precisely the appeal.

And then “Apex” comes along and says: What if surviving the climb was actually the easy part? Indeed, Baltasar Kormákur’s latest survival thriller on Netflix tells a story about a woman obsessed with scaling impossible heights, before swerving into something far more heinous as her personal healing journey through nature turns into a nightmare involving a deeply unwell man, a crossbow and a whole lot of running through the Australian wilderness.

Kormákur also ropes in two of Netflix’s reliable heavy-hitters for the occasion: Charlize Theron, who has firmly settled into action-star mode thanks to “The Old Guard” franchise duties, and Taron Egerton, fresh off his brave contribution to modern holiday cinema with “Carry-On” — yes, we are calling it a Christmas classic.

The film opens with a sequence that is cold in every possible sense of the word. Sasha (Charlize Theron) and her husband Tommy (Eric Bana) are scaling the infamous Troll Wall in Norway, and Kormákur wastes no time reminding us why he remains so good at making audiences feel physically uncomfortable. Every icy gust of wind feels sharp enough to cut through the screen.

The couple eventually settles in for the night, though “settles” feels like a generous description when they’re essentially suspended off the side of a mountain, like a dangling human birdcage. It’s here that Tommy voices concerns about Sasha’s relentless obsession with reaching the summit. She hears him. She even seems to agree. But Sasha is also deeply stubborn. And perhaps this is her folly. Her impatience sabotages her ability to achieve the very thing she wants most.

And almost as quickly as it began, the inevitable tragedy strikes. And so, Eric Bana bows out with his paycheck, falling Gollum style… but at least not into a pit of fire, but rather into the icy floor below. That was cold.

So we get a rude cut to five months later when Sasha arrives in Australia, heading toward the remote wilderness of Wandarra National Park in search of… something. Closure, maybe. Punishment, perhaps. Actually, we are generally kept in the dark about this until the end.

But she’s heading somewhere. Alone. Even when a park ranger explicitly warns her not to venture into the area by herself because multiple people have gone missing, Sasha does what typical thriller protagonists are contractually obligated to do, which is to ignore extremely reasonable advice.

At a gas station, while purchasing a map of the rough terrain ahead, she meets Ben (Taron Egerton), a seemingly friendly local who appears knowledgeable about the area. He’s charming enough. Helpful enough. Slightly off, maybe, but not enough to immediately trigger alarm bells.

He tells her to head down a path that would lead to a campground. He says that it’s lush, beautiful and worth visiting. And Sasha goes off on her way.

Once Sasha ventures deeper into the Australian wilderness, complete with lush forests and violent rivers below, she runs into Ben again. And because movies like this thrive on bad luck, it turns out his helpful demeanour was little more than bait.

Surprise! Ben is, in fact, a deranged psychopath armed with a sophisticated crossbow who enjoys hunting human beings for sport.

And just like that, Apex transforms into exactly what its blunt tagline promises. Let’s go hunt. Let’s survive. One person has to play Tom, and the other Jerry.

Remember the movie “Everest” and the anxiety-inducing heights of its narrative. Well, director Kormakur is back at it, weaponising the survival story and his strengths in telling it. He’s been doing lots of these. “Trapped”, “Adrift”, “The Deep”, “Beast”, and it’s no different with “Apex”.

And to be fair, the film is undeniably effective on a purely physical level. Sasha barrels through nearly every possible environmental nightmare imaginable. She navigates violent rapids. She runs through dense wilderness terrain. There are climbs through rough terrain. She crawls. She gets dragged through enough natural disasters to make that opening mountain climb feel like a warm-up exercise.

There’s a tactile realism here that deserves genuine praise. “Apex” was shot entirely on location, and you can feel it. Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton are actually sprinting through forests, crashing through rough terrain and battling brutal natural elements instead of standing in front of green screens while visual effects artists do the heavy lifting later.

Theron reportedly performed many of her own stunts and trained extensively to convincingly portray a rock climber, and it shows. She fully commits to the physicality of Sasha in a way that makes every injury feel earned. Whether she’s scaling cliffs or steering herself through white-water chaos, she remains one of the most persuasive action stars working today.

But while “Apex” does nail the physical challenge of survival, it struggles with the emotional heartbeat of it all, which is to tell a compelling drama and make us care.

The film becomes increasingly repetitive once the chase structure fully settles in. Sasha runs. Ben catches up. He starts being weird – we’ll get to that. Sasha escapes. And then Ben catches up again through increasingly implausible means. Repeat. Rinse in the river.

Eventually, things take an even darker turn when Ben traps Sasha by baiting her with cheese. Well, no… We jest, it’s not cheese, but just signs of life. Yet, it’s quite comical sometimes, because of the way the scene plays out. You know it’s a trap. But the protagonist has to be in danger for the drama to arrive at its destination.

So he drags her into a hidden cave that’s his own version of a Hannibal lair. There are hanging corpses. Bones. Trophies from previous victims. The movie desperately wants this reveal to feel horrifying. But like we said, the tension here is sometimes laughable.

That’s largely because Egerton’s performance swings wildly between terrifying and unintentionally hilarious. To be clear, and we mean VERY CLEAR, Taron Egerton is fully committed here. He’s not phoning it in. But the choices that he makes for his character may be a turn-off for some. And we are part of that group.

Ben feels like a mashup of Hannibal Lecter and, yes, James McAvoy in Split. In fact, more to the latter, because at some points, he’s just shirtless, bulking, raging, and bald. He has weird vocal tics, and he makes bizarre bird noises while stalking Sasha. At one point, he lets out screams that sound like an unhinged crow flying directly into your living room. It’s meant to be a jumpscare, but come on, it just comes off as comical. We were just laughing.

No doubt, Egerton is clearly having the time of his life playing a complete sicko, and there’s something admirable about how fearlessly weird he gets. Your mileage may vary on whether that weirdness works. But for us, it often pushed the movie into accidental camp.

But, to his credit, he’s never boring. And neither is Theron, who does a lot with little dialogue. Sasha is written more as a vessel for survival than a fully realised character, but Theron injects genuine emotional weight into her silences. She communicates grief, rage and exhaustion through her performance and her dire need to survive and complete her ‘unknown’ mission. Sometimes, all she has to do is glance, and you immediately understand everything Sasha has lost from the start of the film.

Ok, but all the performances don’t translate to good storytelling overall. Yes, “Apex” invests heavily in practical production and demanding physical performances. However, strangely, it feels emotionally undercooked. It’s thrilling in bursts, has some cool filmmaking to look at, and is occasionally elevated by two game performers.

But survival thrillers work best when you’re emotionally invested in whether the protagonist makes it out alive. “Apex” gives us plenty of reasons to admire Sasha’s endurance, but not enough to care about her beyond the obvious desire to see her escape a shrieking crow with a bow.

That’s still enough to make parts of the movie entertaining. Just maybe not memorable.

Maybe, just maybe, we might look back at Taron Egerton shrieking like a possessed bird in the middle of the Australian wilderness.

“Apex” ultimately feels like a movie that prioritises endurance over emotional resonance. It asks us to marvel at how much punishment Sasha can go through, and maybe it isn’t enough somehow. It forgets that survival stories hit hardest when they reveal something deeper about the people fighting to stay alive. You can’t make us care if we’re not even sure who they are in the first place.

Instead, “Apex” settles for being a middling, occasionally ridiculous cat-and-mouse thriller elevated by committed performances and breathtaking real-world locations. Sometimes that’s enough for audiences, and no doubt, it’ll do the classic Netflix numbers. We just wished it climbed higher.

Maybe Sasha needs a new hobby. Pottery. Maybe pickleball. Or fostering crows as a cruel joke.

“Apex” is currently playing on Netflix.