A grieving, guilt-plagued woman travels to Australia to spend some quality alone time in the wilderness. But alas, she’s not alone: She’s joined by a serial killer who’d like to spend some time with her. Apex is a taut but bloody movie that sprints past its inconsistencies to reach the next moment of grotesquery.
“You going out alone?”
So asks a ranger at Australia’s Wandarra National Park. Sasha says nothing.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” the ranger adds.
Perhaps, somewhere inside, Sasha would agree. To go out into this wild, sprawling park? It’s a fool’s errand. Pictures of missing campers, rafters and climbers cover a nearby bulletin board. But Sasha must go out alone. She must.
Five months earlier, she lost Tommy, her climbing partner. Her life partner. They were climbing Norway’s formidable Troll Wall when a storm came up. Though the couple took what precautions they could, luck slipped away that day, and so did Tommy—falling a thousand or more feet to his death.
She gave up climbing after that terrible day, but something still drives her into the wild. And Wandarra is as wild as they come.
Sasha knows the wild, though. Nature rarely scares her. She knows what she’s doing out there.
But people? They’re another story.
She runs into a bit of trouble with a pair of leering hunters at a convenience store. A nice fella—an amateur jerky maker, it seems—helps shoo them away. She didn’t need the guy’s help, but she appreciates it all the same. And she asks him how to get to the Grand Isle Narrows.
He looks at the map. “You want the easy way or the hard way?” he asks.
“The best way,” she tells him.
The man points her toward a secret campsite and the best water around. She thanks him and takes her leave.
The man smiles at their parting. He knows he’ll be seeing her again.
Sasha’s trip to Wandarra proves to be, well, far more challenging than she thought it might be—all for reasons that we’ll get into in just a bit. But the woman proves to be resourceful, resilient and blessed with a superhuman desire to survive. She needs every bit of all three qualities.
The man Sasha meets is named Ben, and he seems to embrace the park—and his practices within it—as being almost almost sacred. He talks to Sasha about the “ritual” that he sees them both engaged in. “Rituals are very important,” he says. “They ground us. They remind us of who we are.”
Ben then tells Sasha about a tribe whose members file their teeth down to fine, sharp points, a ritual that he shows an affinity for. He also mentions another tribe that used to consume the livers of their prey. “Enduring pain is a part of growing up, Sasha,” he tells her. “It’s a rite of passage.”
In a flashback to Norway’s Troll Wall, we see Sasha and Tommy wake up in the same tent—hanging, quite literally, from the cliff face. The two kiss, and Sasha jokes about how bad Tommy’s breath is. They kiss again as they start their climb.
Sasha sits in shorts and a tank top—undergarments, apparently. Another woman wears a cleavage-revealing top. We hear references to girlfriends and boyfriends. A couple of men leer at Sasha at a convenience store. They later run into her at a secluded camp spot and encourage her to join them—though seemingly with threatening intent.
A nude man leaps into a body of water. We see him from a variety of angles—including a view of his bare rear—but his genitals are never visible.
We see a man and a woman, both fully naked. The woman’s breasts are visible, as is a bit of the man’s genitalia. The scene, however, is not meant to be titillating, not in the least. They are both …
… very, very dead. They’re bloated and gray and hanging inside a cave—victims of Ben, who we now know is a serial killer who hunts in the park, killing visitors and ultimately preparing their flesh to make jerky.
The two victims hanging from the cave ceiling are not alone: When Sasha reaches the cave, she’s clearly overwhelmed by the stench. And she later sees the bodies of two children, crossbow bolts sticking out of their chests and backs. (They’re the hanging victims’ kids, and Sasha saw a video of the whole family—alive and happy and, apparently, conversing with Ben—a bit earlier, adding an extra level of horror to the scene.) We learn later that Ben has killed and partly eaten 20 people. (He talks about some of his victims being a part of him in perpetuity, if you catch my drift.)
Ben apparently likes to keep some of his victims alive for a while. (His rituals can feel a bit jumbled.) He tries to shoot Sasha with crossbow bolts for a while. But when she falls into his clutches, rather than kill her right away, Ben takes her to his hideout, so she can hear all his sordid secrets. He often hangs her by her arms—quite a painful state—and keeps her tethered to him with a steel cord. That cord becomes, at times, an instrument for a painful and potentially deadly game of tug-of-war.
Tommy, Sasha’s beau, bounces off a cliff face for a good 20-30 feet, hitting his head. He may be dead or unconscious, but in the long run, it doesn’t much matter: He soon falls much farther, leading to his unquestionable demise.
Another person falls from a steep cliff face and dies. (We see the victim’s bloodied, broken face on a pile of rocks.) A character bites into a guy’s ear and rips a chunk off. Someone’s leg gets broken by a rock: The bone juts out of the skin, and soon, flies begin to fester around the wound. A character gets a face full of painful pepper spray. Characters in a river collide against rocks—sometimes hitting their heads against such protrusions underwater. (Blood seeps from the wounds, and in one case, the victim gets knocked unconscious.) A character nearly drowns another. Someone practically chokes the life out of someone else. Someone gets caught in what looks like a toothless bear trap.
Sasha playfully hits Tommy. Hunters carry some deer carcasses on the back of their trucks. People tumble through rapids and over waterfalls. Sasha spies a snake in her tent. Bolts strike trees, and one may hit Sasha’s backpack. Much of Sasha’s skin is covered in scrapes and bruises. When in Norway, we see her putting medication on her worn, damaged fingers (a hazard of her rock-climbing hobby).
Characters say the f-word about 15 times and the s-word about half that many. We also hear “a–,” “d–n” and “h—.” God’s name is misused three times, once with the word “d–n,” and Jesus’ name is abused once.
Ben makes a joking reference to “roofies.”
Both Sasha and Ben vomit. It’s suggested that someone is wearing his mother’s false teeth.
In 1924, Richard Connell wrote a short story called “The Most Dangerous Game,” wherein a famous big-game hunter gets shipwrecked on an island and discovers the island’s owner is a fan of hunting as well. Only he prefers to hunt human quarry.
More than a century later, Netflix’s Apex offers its own, modern twist on that famous tale. Starring the always-capable Charlize Theron, the film gives us a simple story of survival.
But simple does not equal satisfying. Or sensible. Or sanitary.
Apex speeds past its occasional inconsistencies at breakneck speed, careening into the movie’s next moment of grotesquery. Forget the threat of a mere serial killer: He’s got to be a cannibal, as well. Oh, yeah, and he’s making extra cash, apparently, by selling the meat of his victims.
This film relishes more in shock than in the story’s innate sense of peril and terror. It’d rather make you wince and gag than give you goosebumps. The language can be predictably raw, too—all done to perhaps make a fairly forgettable flick stick in your mind a little bit more. Or, if not in your mind, at least in your craw.
Apex falls short of its lofty title. Despite its strong performances, the film loses its grip and slips into the overpopulated realm of needlessly grotesque thrillers.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
