Apex (2026) Gives Me Charlize, Chaos, and Just Enough Crazy to Recommend It

A mountain climber haunted by a fatal decision in Norway retreats to the Australian wilderness for isolation. Her journey turns into a desperate hunt when a deceptive local targets her as his next ritualistic prey in the bush.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgv8jf_8dm0

I watched Apex hoping for a nasty little thriller and not another sermon disguised as content, where a guy in a cape saves the multiverse while delivering dialogue that sounds like it was workshopped by a toaster with a LinkedIn account. What I got instead was Charlize Theron dragging a very solid survival movie up a cliff face by its teeth. Not flawlessly, mind you. This thing has some soft spots. But brother, in a season where half the screen is either spandex or machine-learning angst, Apex felt like finding a real steak in a food court. It is sweaty, dangerous, scenic, and just mean enough to wake you up.

The setup is clean and blessedly spoiler-safe: Theron plays Sasha, a mountain climber carrying grief like a backpack full of cinder blocks, and she heads into the Australian wilderness looking for isolation. Since this is a thriller and not an REI catalog, things go sideways when she crosses paths with Ben, played by Taron Egerton, who turns the bush into his own private carnival of bad intentions. Director Baltasar Kormákur keeps the premise lean, and Netflix clearly knew what it had: a stripped-down star vehicle built around one woman, one madman, and a whole lot of terrain that wants everybody dead.

What I liked most is that Charlize is a bad ass without the movie asking me to pretend gravity signed a waiver. That matters. There is a world of difference between “capable” and “cartoon,” and Apex stays on the right side of that line more often than not. Theron trained with Beth Rodden, one of the real-deal elite climbers out there, and you can feel the difference in the way she moves. The climbing looks like climbing. The strain looks like strain. She told People she was doing the actual mountain climbing and doing it barefoot, which is the sort of sentence that makes my knees file a complaint just hearing it.

And yes, the scenery is one of the main characters. I know that phrase gets abused more than a studio note, but here it is actually true. The Blue Mountains and the surrounding New South Wales locations are not just pretty postcards taped behind the actors. They close in on the movie. They menace it. Ausfilm’s behind-the-scenes coverage talks about crews hiking, swimming, and dragging gear through locations so difficult that cinematographer Lawrence Sher basically wondered how the human race survived long enough to invent cameras. That effort shows. The place has weight. It has teeth. It has that rare quality of making me want to visit while also making me update my will.

Taron Egerton gives the movie some genuinely great thriller moments too. He doesn’t play this guy like a Bond villain giving a TED Talk on trauma. He plays him like a local nightmare who got bored and decided to improvise. There is an unhinged energy to him that works, even when the movie occasionally indulges him a little too much. Publicly, one of his weirdest choices went viral enough that Netflix was bragging about the soundtrack bump and People was covering how a standout moment was his idea. So if the internet turns his screaming into a meme template, that feels less like an accident and more like the inevitable byproduct of letting him go full feral in a thriller.

What really sold me, though, is that Apex feels like a surprise. It is not trying to build a cinematic universe, rehabilitate a toy line, or remind me that AI will soon compose our eulogies in product-manager jargon. It just wants to put me in the woods with a hunted woman and a predator and ask whether craft, tension, and movie star presence still count for anything. Turns out they do. The script was a Black List screenplay before Netflix picked it up, and the final movie still carries some of that old-school spec-thriller DNA: clear premise, hard edges, no patience for bloat. That alone feels borderline rebellious in 2026.

That said, let me take off my rose-colored binoculars for a second. The dialogue could have been better. Sometimes it feels like the screenplay translated itself into simpler English halfway through production, as if somebody got nervous that an audience raised on second-screen living might panic at a complete sentence. This is more or less where the critics landed too. Rotten Tomatoes’ consensus praises the locations and Theron’s athleticism but says the film skimps on finer details, and the general review pattern says the same thing in nicer suits: strong physical filmmaking, shakier writing. I felt that. You can feel where this movie could have cut deeper and talked smarter.

I also wanted more Eric Bana. Full stop. The man shows up with instant credibility, and the movie uses him like it rented him by the week. Which, to be fair, may not be far from the truth since Theron herself said Bana joined them for about three weeks and that she had wanted to work with him for more than 20 years. He is good. He matters. He also made me wish the movie had found a way to build him deeper into the emotional architecture instead of treating him like a very handsome structural beam.

My other frustration is that Apex hints at a richer serial-killer movie than the one it finally becomes. I liked the cat-and-mouse torture element. I actually wanted more of it, or at least more of the psychological wiring behind it. Not more gore, not more spoiler-y nonsense, just more insight into what makes Ben tick besides “gee, this fellow seems unhealthy.” Egerton is doing enough work that you start wishing the script would meet him halfway. Same with the yelling. There is a line between unnerving and “somebody please unplug the kettle,” and the film tap-dances on it. I could have done with a little less screaming and a little more background.

One thing I did appreciate is that Theron didn’t just treat the prep like another actor boot camp she could survive on charisma and ibuprofen. She really learned the craft, and the prep even bled into family life a bit, with her daughter August joining some climbing sessions. There were also Australian reports tying that Apex period to time with her daughters in Sydney. That detail fits the movie somehow. It is a film about grit, yes, but it is also about somebody dragging herself back toward life. Knowing the work behind it wasn’t fake gives the whole thing a little more backbone.

So where do I land? I land in the exact sweet spot where a movie can be clearly flawed and still very worth your time. Apex is not the apex of thrillers. The title oversells it like a guy at a supplement kiosk promising visible abs by Tuesday. But it is tense, visual, grounded, and anchored by a star who knows how to carry pain, action, and pure stubborn resolve without turning into a superhero bobblehead. Charlize does the heavy lifting, Taron gives you enough good crazy to keep things twitchy, the scenery practically deserves above-the-title billing, and the whole thing moves fast enough that its weaker writing never fully kneecaps it. 7.0/10.