In “Apex,” a friendly guide turns out to be a killer hunting a woman in the southeastern Australian rainforest. There’s not much more you need to know. This is a movie whose summary is enough to intimate the full experience of watching it: an hour and a half of having one’s basest and most primal pleasures and emotions tickled. Think sweaty palms from watching someone dangling from a cliff’s edge, the shudder of bones cracking and the skin-crawling sensation of seeing Taron Egerton turn into a skeevy, animalistic Norman Bates.
Directed by Baltasar Kormakur, whose career includes several nature-based nail-biters (see “Everest” and “Adrift”), this Netflix thriller is a fun-enough time that is elevated by the performances of predator and prey. Egerton descends into full-tilt madness as Ben, a local who points Sasha (Charlize Theron) toward a certain route in the wilderness, only to begin a game of cat and mouse. Sasha has come to Australia to escape, still reeling from a tragic accident months earlier on a treacherous mountain climb.
That emotional back story is plopped in to create a halfhearted motivational arc to the affair, but it does provide a base for the sense of fortitude and grit that is second nature to Theron. As Ben reveals new layers to his monstrous side, Sasha mostly just narrows her eyes and steels herself for the challenge; this is less the story of a woman lost in the wilderness and learning how to fight back than a wearied adventurer facing off against a hunter.
That dynamic between Egerton and Theron — of a psycho versus an action star — is enough to animate the first half of the film, even if one wishes Kormakur had a couple more flourishes up his sleeve. He is a somewhat mechanical director who, in creating tension, relies mostly on the plain facts of danger built into the script or the forces of nature — a head thumped upon a rock in a rushing river, a snowstorm thrashing the side of a mountain — rather than on making those elements come alive in particularly cinematic terms.
Still, the bumps and bruises are enough to get the blood pumping. And when it has run its course of the various perils of the Australian landscape, the film nudges Egerton into further derangement to keep things interesting. It involves a cave and some gestures toward Ben’s past, but thankfully the movie has no interest in lore-building. With his gaunt twitchiness here, Egerton is a good enough actor that guessing how he came to be is scarier than explaining it.
As the film eventually turns toward the provocatively macabre, there is a pulpy quality to the thrills. But it’s a thrill ride nonetheless, even if you know the drops are manufactured, and that you might not ever bother to get back on it again.
Apex
Rated R for some strong violence, grisly images, nudity and language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
