“What’s the matter?” Ben asks Sasha in Baltasar Kormákur’s new thriller Apex. “I thought you liked danger.”
Charlize Theron’s (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Old Guard) Sasha is an adrenaline junkie, a recently bereaved mountain climber searching for a rush. But this adventure is a step too far. Lost in the Australian outback, her equipment gone missing in the night, Sasha is at Ben’s mercy. And that’s not a comfortable place to be. Ben, played by Taron Egerton (Kingsman: The Secret Service, Carry-On), has very little mercy. In fact, he’s a psychopathic killer who loves only one thing: the hunt.
That might not sound like an ideal vacation. But Theron finds beauty in strange places. “This movie really fired up my brain,” she tells Netflix. “There was something about the simplicity of it that I found beautiful — not simple in a negative way but beautiful in its simplicity and not trying to be contrived. It felt very pure but with great impact.”
The simplicity of Apex starts with its performers: two main cast members, chasing each other through the wilds of New South Wales, Australia (playing itself). The prospect proved irresistible to Egerton as well. “Doing something with this very pure action element — out in the wilderness, in a fairly exotic place by a Welshman’s standards — was a big draw,” he tells Netflix. “And then the idea of doing such a strange two‑hander with someone like Charlize, who’s an incredible actor and a massive star, felt like an undeniable opportunity.”
For Sasha and Ben, the opportunity is life or death — and maybe a little bit more. “When I read the script, it felt very visceral to me — almost existential,” Kormákur (Everest, Adrift) tells Netflix. “Through action, through horror, through hardship, you reveal the characters, and that’s always been important to me.”
But to really appreciate the fruits of her unlikely vision quest, Sasha will have to survive. “She has to win,” Theron agrees. “It’s really a story about survival, not just physically but emotionally, and about finding out what you’re made of.”
Read on to find out how Sasha survives her ordeal — and her grief.
Even before Sasha meets Ben, Apex opens with tragedy. While climbing Norway’s Troll Wall, Sasha’s partner, Tommy (UNTAMED’s Eric Bana), calls her out for her reckless approach. “That’s exactly why you have a climbing partner,” he tells her, “so that someone can make the call when one of you loses the plot.” Later, while bedding down in their cliffside portaledge, Tommy confides in Sasha that he’s ready to say goodbye to their thrill-seeking life and settle down. His luck, as represented by his omnipresent lucky compass, might have run out.
Sasha doesn’t take it well, but agrees to turn back as a storm on the mountain worsens. Unfortunately for the both of them, Tommy was right about his luck. As they rappel down the mountain, an avalanche hits. Tommy is sent plummeting down the cliff, and Sasha has no choice but to release his dead weight, or she’ll die with him.
Cut to Australia, five months later. Sasha is driving a loaded van through the outback, with Tommy’s compass beside her. Tommy is gone, but his presence hangs over the film — and over Sasha’s life. “Eric Bana came in and created a great relationship with Charlize,” Kormákur says. “He’s an excellent actor.” He’s also a comforting presence that Sasha is about to be craving even more.
Almost immediately, Sasha is greeted with a warning when she enters a park station: a wall of photos of missing people, victims of the surging tides and vast forests of the outback.
“I’m from a country [Iceland] where the weather changes every five minutes,” Kormákur says. “You’re up against nature your whole life. It becomes a big part of who we are, and I wanted to use the landscape in that way. I like that when you buy a ticket to a movie, it can take you on a journey. You can travel through film. I want the audience to feel they’ve been in the place, that they’ve felt it and almost smelled it.”
Despite warnings from a park employee, Sasha is undeterred. She stocks up on some jerky and evades the advances of a crew of menacing hunters — with some unwanted assistance from Ben, an outdoorsman who makes his own beef jerky and knows the area like the back of his hand. Ben gives Sasha a hot tip, a route to a beautiful camping spot that only locals know.
“He presents as this very innocent guy who wants to be helpful,” Theron says. “But I think there’s something about her that makes her a little bit reserved, just in general. That relationship becomes, right off the bat, one that Sasha really doesn’t want to have.”
Good instinct. Ben’s kindly facade crumbles quickly once Sasha has made it through a white-water gauntlet and arrives at the spot Ben recommended. Her pack missing, she stumbles upon Ben’s camp, and he offers her a meal and a spare set of supplies. Soon, it becomes clear that he’s been watching her, with a far darker motive than Sasha can even imagine. “He tells her to go on a special route through the wilderness, apparently so that she can see areas of outstanding natural beauty,” Egerton says. “But it is, in fact, because he’s this psychopathic serial killer, and he wants to hunt her through the woods.”
It was Ben, not a rummaging wombat, who stole Sasha’s equipment, right down to Tommy’s old bracelets. He offers her a simple opportunity: She has until the Chemical Brothers’s “Go” ends to run away from him. Then he’ll follow, with a crossbow in hand. Sasha has graduated to a new level of endurance test.
Ben pulls out every trick in his book to catch Sasha. He lures her into a trap with phone audio of a family on the river, tries to knock her off a cliff with unexpected noises, and fires crossbow bolt after bolt at her. “There’s something very primal in Ben,” Egerton says. “A lot of the things he does in the movie are actually taken from my own life. I remember being a kid, playing tag and chasing other kids around, getting overexcited, the little whoops and exclamations you make.”
Things come to a head when Sasha spots her adversary sunbathing in the river, and she makes a desperate attempt to steal his canoe. “It turns into a very contentious predator/prey [relationship],” Theron says. “They have to outdo and outwit each other in order to keep moving forward, to try and get out of, not just each other’s grasp, but the environment as well.”
A well-placed bear trap fells Sasha and lands her back in Ben’s clutches, where he needles her over her failure to save Tommy. Ben drags Sasha to an underground lair, where we learn the disturbing truth of Ben’s life in the outback: He’s been killing for sport for years, and the other missing hikers are his handiwork. To make matters even more stomach-churning, Ben’s Jenno beef jerky, named for his mother, is made from the bodies of his victims. Sasha will live to regret her campsite snack.
Ben’s twisted psychology rises to the surface as he prepares for the “ritual” of Sasha’s sacrifice. He hints at the story of his first murder: his own mother, who he claims is now a part of him. “Ben as a character is besotted and obsessed with this environment,” Egerton says. “He’s completely in love with this part of the world and expresses a sense of oneness with it.”
That twisted spirituality has led Ben to file his teeth down the way he claims some native tribes do. It’s a twisted sight he reveals to Sasha just before she makes a bid for escape, biting a chunk of his ear off and wriggling her way back to the river, still bound. Ben ties himself to her and comes along for the ride. This was a particular challenge for the actors.
“This element of being tied to somebody for the entire movie … I had no idea,” Theron says. “When I read the script, I was like, ‘That’s cool.’ And then we actually shot it, and I was like, ‘This is one of the hardest things.’ ”
Sasha drags Ben down another white-water course, and they land at the bottom of a ravine, where a heated fistfight lands Ben on the ground, his leg damaged beyond repair. The next morning, Sasha makes a last bid for survival. She and Ben will perform a tandem climb out of the ravine — or die there.
Sasha and Ben begin their final climb together, with Ben’s leg harnessed securely. Theron went through extensive training for these portions of the film, enlisting storied rock climber Beth Rodden to coach her through the challenge.
“I’ve had a lot of martial arts and fighting training, and most of the action work I’ve done lives in that world, but this was very different,” Theron says. “This is about endurance and strength. The technique of climbing is really beautiful because it doesn’t conform to one thing; it’s a real art. You have to make it your own and put in the hours to understand it.”
At the end of the day, Sasha has put in those hours. Ben has not. In a moment that serves as a triumphant mirror of Tommy’s tragic death, Sasha detaches Ben’s harness and lets him fall to the bottom of the ravine with a sickening thud. A close-up on his ravaged face suggests Ben won’t be hunting again.
When Sasha finally makes her way out of the ravine, she has a moment of rapture — she crumbles into simultaneous tears and laughter. It was a genuine reaction from the actor tasked with making the climb. “To make it look like real climbing, you have to actually climb,” Theron says. “You have to kick all those muscles in, or it starts to look fake. What you see takes maybe 20 or 30 seconds in the movie, but it took me about 38 minutes to do. It was that hard.”
For Theron, this section of the movie served as a microcosm of everything Sasha has been through. “When I finally got to the top, I just kept in mind how crazy the story is,” she says. “It’s such an insane story, and you try to put yourself in the character’s shoes doing that final climb. You can’t help but think, ‘What did I just experience? I shouldn’t be alive. I came across this psychopath, and I’m up here.’ Her whole life hits her in that moment.”
Sasha makes her way out of the park and reports Ben’s murder spree. Then she makes her way to the beach and says goodbye to Tommy’s memory — and his lucky compass, which she tosses into the surf with a kiss. It’s a moment of quiet peace after the chaos of Sasha’s ordeal. She’s made it through the wilderness, against all odds.
“It’s primal,” Theron says. “It’s the whole theory behind the mom who can lift the car when her kid is under it. There’s this thing that is beautiful in humanity, where we can do things that we don’t even imagine we can do.”
Apex is now streaming on Netflix.
