Apex review: a deadly game of hide-and-seek in the bush

It’s a bit of a cliché to say that the big attraction when it comes to Australian films is Australia itself. That said, Australia – specifically the Blue Mountains, where much of this was filmed – definitely puts its best foot forward in Apex. Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur (Beast, 2 Guns) delivers shot after shot of gorgeous scenery and striking locations. It’s all so stunning to look at it’s tempting to book in a visit… if not for all the brutal murders, of course.

Sasha (Charlize Theron) and her partner Tommy (Eric Bana) are starting to wonder if they should put a life of extreme climbing behind them. The fact that they’re having this discussion on a tent attached to the side of a cliff in the frozen wastes of Norway suggests that the correct answer is ‘hell yes’.

But Sasha can’t let her dream of making it to the top of the cheerily titled ‘Troll Wall’ go, even when Tommy is giving the kind of speech about moving on and settling down and enjoying life that guarantees he’ll be heading down the mountain at a much faster speed than planned. (At least he gets to drop some quality Aussie lines like ‘fuck, there’s a bit of shit weather coming in’ and ‘I’m sorry Sash, I’m just being a bit of a sook’ before descending at a very rapid rate.)

Five months later and Sasha is driving alone through a national park, seemingly exclusively populated by ute-driving thugs who specialise in leering at women.

Pushing the genre to the extreme

Fortunately, door-to-door jerky salesman Ben (Taron Egerton) is there to defend Sasha’s honor from the thugs – even if everyone who’s ever seen a movie in their life knows there’s a very good reason why his jerky doesn’t have a list of ingredients on the pack.

Things progress in the usual manner from there, though it doesn’t take long for Apex to make its pitch as to why we needed yet another outback game of cat-and-mouse with a blokey serial killer. While it’s true this doesn’t really do anything new story-wise, it firmly commits to doing the same old stuff in extreme fashion. With this kind of story, that counts for a lot.

For example, Sasha’s first trip down the rapids pushes the limits of what we’re used to with this kind of scene: this isn’t just rough water, it’s the kind of river where you’re legitimately concerned for the stunt person who has to go down it.

While this largely cycles through a small number of physical challenges – there’s rough water rapids, there’s climbing up crumbling cliffs without a rope, and there’s getting bashed with rocks – each go-round brings something new that pushes things just that little bit further.

At barely 90 minutes, this constantly mixes things up so that there’s no time to get used to one situation before Sasha is plunged into the next. First there’s creepy wilderness and an unsettling Ben, then there’s a deadly game of hide-and-seek in the bush, then there’s the reveal of what’s really going on with Ben – which is so over-the-top it’s almost laughable, but in a good way – and then there’s a battle of wits, and remember all that freestyle rock climbing at the start? That was only the beginning.

Don’t stop, don’t slow down

The way the story is constantly moving forward, refusing to give the characters or the viewer the chance to settle into a rhythm, more than makes up for the fact that there’s nothing particularly new going on here. Well, apart from Egerton’s accent, which is a mix of Australian and ‘let’s just have some fun with it’, though we do get an explanation in one of the film’s rare – and largely superfluous – dialogue-heavy moments.

Then there’s the scenery, which is amazingly beautiful even when a tiger snake is slithering through it. Fortunately this is not the kind of film where someone says ‘how can something so beautiful be so deadly’, presumably because we all know how it can be deadly – they keep climbing up massive cliffs and chasms without ropes, and when they do have ropes they’re wedging them into tiny cracks and expecting them to stay secure.

Theron’s performance is largely confined to convincing us she’s someone who could physically do the many extreme things shown here, and she’s an old hand at that. Egerton gets a little more to do and has a bit of fun with it, but as far as presence goes he’s no match for Theron. Which is kind of the point, as he’s basically an annoying loser ruining her day.

The plot may not be breaking new ground and outback killers are old news, but seeing Sasha halfway up a very high cliff trying to figure out how she’s going to wedge her hand into a tiny gap so she can move a little further up is something that never gets stale. Or comfortable if you’re in any way afraid of heights. Tommy definitely had the right idea there; if only he’d kept it to himself until they made it back down.

Apex premieres on Netflix on 24 April.

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