Into the cinematic meatgrinder goes The Most Dangerous Game (1932), Psycho (1960), Deliverance (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Cliffhanger (1993), The River Wild (1994), and Free Solo (2020), and out comes Apex, the latest of director Baltasar Kormákur's survival thrillers. Having already directed Idris Elba battling for his life against wild beasts in a South African game preserve in Beast (2022), Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin trying to survive the open ocean in Adrift (2018), and a whole hosts of Hollywood heavies trying to make it down the mountain alive in Everest (2015), Kormákur now sets his sights on Charlize Theron as a seasoned thrill seeker trying to make it out of the Australian Outback alive. However, this time it isn't just the brutality of nature that Theron is battling, but rather a determined psychopath played by Taron Egerton who is set on making her the next victim of his twisted, mommy-issues-driven ritual.

However, before we even get the movie's title on-screen, we get the tragic backstory of Theron's character, Sasha, in which she loses her husband (Eric Bana) in a climbing accident on Norway's icy Troll Wall (for those not familiar, it is the tallest vertical rock face in Europe, standing some 3,600 feet). These opening sequences sketch in Sasha's thrill-seeking character, although Theron, an actor capable of imbuing even the most thinly sketched characters with depth and resonance, does most of the heavy lifting (the screenplay by Jeremy Robbins, a regular on The Purge series, is a deft assemblage of familiar parts with a few surprising turns). Therefore, when she shows up at a ranger station in a national park in Australia, we know that the park ranger's warnings about not going in alone will leave her unfazed. If she was tough and daring before her husband's death, now she is also resolute and damaged.

That doesn't mean that she is invincible, and part of the reason Apex works as well as it does is because Theron makes Sasha simultaneously bad-ass and vulnerable, both physically and emotionally. Kormákur, whose last film was the uncharacteristic romantic drama Touch (Snerting, 2024), knows his way around tension and violence, but he also has a deft feel for how to use close-ups for maximum impact, and he clearly recognizes that the nuances of Theron's eyes and face can give otherwise rote action scenarios and moments of suspense a deeper human impression.

When Sasha finds herself surrounded by leering hunters first at a gas station and later at night on a river's edge, she clearly feels threatened and cornered, and Theron primes the later scenes with her coiled defensiveness. She is both athletic and intelligent, both of which will be essential when she eventually finds herself at the mercy of Egerton's Ben, who at first seems like the nice guy (but then again, so did Norman Bates). Lured into a remote part of the park with the promise of better whitewater kayaking, Sasha becomes a pawn in Ben's most dangerous game, where he hunts her through the bush, over hills, and down raging rapids. It is here that the film is at its most routine, as Ben becomes like a slasher villain, always popping up and never being at any risk of being left behind, no matter how intensely Sasha runs.

But, then there is a whole third act in which Sasha becomes Ben's captive and learns the depths of his depravity, setting in motion a clever game of cat and mouse in which the hunter and the hunters are literally tied together. This last act contains some of the film's biggest surprises and departures from expectation, which makes Apex, if not exactly original, at least a particularly potent assemblage of familiar pieces.

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