APEX (2026) Review

APEX is a new Netflix original, a cat-and-mouse survival thriller starring Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton. The premise has genuine potential — isolation, survival instinct, a compelling antagonist — and on paper, the cast alone is reason enough to show up. Kormakur has made this kind of high-stakes physical cinema before, so there was no obvious reason to walk in expecting disaster.

And yet...

GENERAL THOUGHTS

APEX is the kind of film that relies almost entirely on its action to carry the load — and that would be fine, if the action actually delivered. The problem is that the screenplay gives you nothing to fall back on when it doesn't. No real character development, no emotional investment built over time, no tension that gets a chance to breathe before the next scene crashes in and out. Films like this live and die on the combination of the physical set pieces AND everything surrounding them: the mystery of the outcome, the connection to the people in danger, the slow build of dread. APEX skips all of that and just assumes you'll be along for the ride.

I clocked where this was going within the first few minutes. And I want to be clear — I am not saying that as a flex. The film telegraphs its beats so loudly that I think it's possible a blind person could have the movie on mute and still probably call it with pinpoint accuracy. Predictability in genre films is forgivable when the execution is strong enough to make you forget you saw it coming. APEX never gets there.

PERFORMANCES

Taron Egerton is the only clear reason to watch this film. That is not an exaggeration, and I want to be precise about what he does here because it deserves more than a general compliment. Ben is a charismatic psychopath, and Egerton plays him as this wild, unnerving blend of Norman Bates and Ash Williams — the momma's boy unraveling at the seams, crossed with the type of guy who's somehow thriving in the chaos he creates. There is a scene where Ben pulls out a boombox and blasts "Nasty Boy" by the Icelandic rock band Trabant, singing along with a deranged smile, crazy-eyed and completely off the rails as if the lyrics were literally written in his honor. It is one of the more memorable moments, and it encapsulates everything Egerton is doing here. He commits fully. He never once lets you see him calculating the performance. He is having an absolute blast, and somehow that makes Ben more unsettling rather than less. He saved this film.

Charlize Theron does the work she was asked to do here, and I want to be fair about that. She is not phoning it in. She is present, she is physical, and she holds the frame. The issue is the material, not the effort. Sasha is supposed to be anchored by grief and a will to survive, but the screenplay never gives Theron the scaffolding to make that grief mean anything. She's going through it, that much is clear — but why should you care? Compare this to what she brought to Atomic Blonde, to The Old Guard, even Aeon Flux, and the gap is significant. In those films, you understood what was at stake for the character beyond the immediate physical danger. But, Here? Not so much.

Eric Bana appears in the film's opening sequence, which is meant to establish Sasha's loss and the emotional weight she carries into the wilderness. The scene doesn't land — more on that below — and the frustrating part is that Bana's presence there raises the stakes of that failure. You have Eric Bana. You have an opening sequence designed to make the audience feel something. Neither of those things are easy to come by, and the film wastes both of them in the same swing.

TECHNICAL / DIRECTION

The one area where APEX does something right, consistently, is the Australian landscape. The cinematography and on-location visuals are genuinely impressive — wide, open, raw, and very good to look at. That is not a trivial thing. The setting has an authenticity to it that a lot of films like this fake with green screen and call it a day. APEX does not do that, and it shows.

Everything else from a direction standpoint is where Kormakur struggles. The cold open is the clearest example. It exists to establish Sasha's grief, to give the audience a reason to root for her survival beyond the obvious, and it introduces Eric Bana in a setup that implies some real emotional payoff down the line. None of that pays off. There are no flashbacks, no callbacks, no "ah-hah!" moments. It just sits there, disconnected. The action sequences have the same problem — they arrive quickly, they end even quicker, and you're left wondering how you got from point A to point B. The fight choreography in particular asks a lot of your suspension of disbelief, and by the time the third or fourth sequence rolls around, checked-out is the only honest word for where I was.

FINAL THOUGHTS

APEX is a largely predictable and emotionally thin thriller that gets by almost entirely on one extraordinary performance. Taron Egerton gives you something genuinely worth watching, and there were moments in this film where I was leaning in purely because of what he was doing in the scene. That matters. But one performance, however committed, cannot hold up a screenplay that never bothered to build the world around it. If you go in knowing that is exactly what you're getting — Egerton in full flight, and not much else — you might find just enough here to get through it.

🍿 SCORE = 51 / 100