I SAW APEX

Apex, directed by Baltasar (Beast 2022/Adrift) Kormakur and scripted by Jeremy (Aftermath/The Purge) Robbins, is a new, survivalist/escape thriller. It echoes author Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game and so many of its run-for-your-life adaptations and offshoots, including Apex 2021 (an unrelated but mirroring effort with Bruce Willis and Neal McDonough), Cliffhanger, Deliverance, Hunter's Blood, Rituals, Wake in Fright, The River Wild, Speak No Evil, Ready or Not, Send Help and through basic (though no less potent) allusion, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Motel Hell, I Spit on Your Grave and The Hills Have Eyes. The movie also depicts the unbridled brunt of a woman's endurance, not only to overcome nature's austere elements, but lost love. 

Charlize (Fury Road/Prometheus/Mighty Joe Young) Theron portrays Sasha, whose spouse, Tommy (Eric Bana), dies in an Australian, rock-climbing mishap (enacted in the movie's opening). Tommy's death drives Sasha to return to his Outback turf, where she meets Taron (The Rocketman/The Kingsman/Robin Hood) Egerton's affable Ben. 

Though Sasha is told not to venture out on her own for adventurous thrills, she dismisses the warning. It's Ben who gives her the encouragement to do so at a pitstop, where the vicinity's kangaroo hunters give her some flirtatious ribbing, but when Ben re-emerges at her camp, she realizes his kindness is a ruse. Ben wants to hunt and kill her, which pushes Sasha's survival mode to the apex. 

What ensues rolls like a forbidding, cat-and-mouse travelogue, with Kormakur churning an atmosphere reminiscent of a Werner Herzog movie: idyllic on top, though dangerous below. 

From a basic, horror vantage, Ben more than does his job. Though the deeper details of his life are kept (for better or worse) vague, we do learn that he may have been a Bates-esque mama's boy and that he's been killing people, chopping up their carcasses and selling such to the pitstop as beef jerky. Indeed, he's a human monster and like many of his cinematic type, proud of it. 

Perhaps to its detriment, Apex isn't packed with many surprises. One knows the layout pretty much upfront, with events never mounting toward anything too unexpected, unless one counts Ben's charming deflection and his big, beef-jerky reveal. This may not please all viewers, who may find the story too straightforward. Those, however, who enjoy the symbolic strife of life (and how to derail it) will be inclined to embrace Apex's rugged palette. 

For those of either persuasion, Apex awaits at Netflix.