TLDR: Apex is a 2026 survival action thriller directed by Baltasar Kormákur and streaming exclusively on Netflix. Charlize Theron plays Sasha, a grieving rock climber who heads into the Australian wilderness and finds herself hunted by a cannibalistic killer played by Taron Egerton. It runs 95 minutes, holds 65% on Rotten Tomatoes, and hit 100 million views on Netflix in under a month. It debuted at number one globally and stayed there for two straight weeks. Critics called it lean, mean, and driven entirely by Theron. Audiences watched it anyway — in enormous numbers.
I want to start with that number: 100 million views in under a month.
In its first week on Netflix, Apex pulled in 38.2 million views and immediately hit number one globally, reaching the top spot in 82 countries. In week two, viewership actually went up — 40.2 million views, still number one. By the end of its first month, it had crossed 100 million views and was on track to crack Netflix’s all-time most-watched films list.
For context, Netflix’s tenth-most-watched English-language film of all time is Millie Bobby Brown’s Damsel, which reached 138 million views in three months. Apex is chasing that number fast.
So here is the real question. Is it actually good? Or did 100 million people just need something intense to watch on a Friday night?
My honest answer: it is better than critics are giving it credit for — and Charlize Theron is the reason why.
Apex — Movie Details
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Title | Apex |
| Netflix Release | April 24, 2026 |
| Director | Baltasar Kormákur |
| Written by | Jeremy Robbins |
| Produced by | Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, David Ready, Ian Bryce, Charlize Theron, AJ Dix, Beth Kono, Baltasar Kormákur |
| Production | Chernin Entertainment, Ian Bryce Productions, Denver and Delilah Productions, RVK Studios |
| Distributor | Netflix |
| Cinematography | Lawrence Sher |
| Music | Högni Egilsson |
| Runtime | 95 minutes |
| Language | English |
| Rating | R |
| Filming Locations | Sydney and Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia |
What Is Apex About?
It starts in Norway, on the Troll Wall — one of the most dangerous rock faces in Europe.
Sasha and her husband Tommy are tandem climbing when a storm hits. They start to rappel back down. An avalanche knocks Tommy off the rope. Sasha is forced to let him go. She watches him fall. He dies. And she never forgives herself for surviving.
Five months later, Sasha is driving alone toward Wandarra National Park in Australia. She is not there to heal. She is there to push herself until the grief stops being the loudest thing in the room. A ranger warns her about disappearances in the area. She half-listens and heads in anyway.
She kayaks through rapids. She camps overnight. She wakes up to find her bag missing.
When she tracks it down to the camp of a man named Ben, he seems helpful at first — friendly, outdoorsy, weirdly well-informed about her climbing history and Tommy’s death. Then he brings out a crossbow and tells her she has until the end of one song before he starts hunting her.
What follows is 75 minutes of Sasha using everything she knows about terrain, endurance, and survival instinct to stay alive — while Ben, who turns out to be a cannibal practising ritualistic kills, tracks her through the Australian bush.
The film does not waste a single minute. At 95 minutes total, Apex is lean in a way that most survival thrillers are not. It sets up, it pivots, and it does not stop until the end.
Full Cast Breakdown
| Actor | Character |
|---|---|
| Charlize Theron | Sasha — a grieving rock climber and adrenaline junkie |
| Taron Egerton | Ben — a psychopathic cannibalistic killer |
| Eric Bana | Tommy — Sasha’s husband, killed in the opening sequence |
| Matt Whelan | One of the hunters Sasha encounters at the bay |
The film is essentially a two-hander. Theron and Egerton carry almost every scene between them, sometimes together, sometimes separately. Eric Bana’s Tommy exists primarily in the opening and in Sasha’s memory — but his presence runs through the entire film as the emotional engine of everything Sasha does.
Charlize Theron — Why She Makes This Work
If you have seen Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road, Atomic Blonde, or The Old Guard, you already know what she brings to physically demanding action roles.
She insists on doing her own stunts wherever possible. Her physicality is not performed — it is real, and you feel the difference on screen. In those films she was matching or outpacing male co-stars in every action sequence. In Apex, she is essentially the sole engine of every action scene, and she handles it with the same total commitment.
But what makes Theron special in Apex is not the stunts. It is the weight she carries under all of it. Sasha is not just a woman trying to survive a psychopath. She is a woman who already lost the thing that mattered most to her and is not entirely sure she wants to survive. That ambiguity — does she fight this hard because she wants to live, or because enduring pain is the only way she knows how to process grief — is in every scene, even the ones that are purely about running and climbing and not dying.
Theron finds that layer without drawing attention to it. The Hollywood Reporter described the film as a welcome showcase for everything Theron does in action cinema — and called her performance the clearest argument for why she belongs in this genre alongside any male action star working today.
Variety noted that the film’s soul belongs to the multiplex rather than streaming, and that Theron anchors it with the kind of committed physical work that demands a big screen.
I agree with both assessments.
Taron Egerton as the Villain
Taron Egerton has had significant Netflix success before this. His film Carry-On, co-starring Jason Bateman, is currently one of the platform’s most-watched original films of all time with over 170 million views in its first three months.
In Apex, he is playing something completely different — and it works precisely because you would not expect it from him.
Ben is theatrical. He has constructed an elaborate personal mythology around his cannibalism — claiming that consuming his victims keeps them alive inside him, that it is a ritual act rather than a psychopathic one. Egerton plays all of this with a calm, studied quality that is far more unsettling than if he had gone big and loud. The scene where he pulls out the crossbow and explains the rules of the hunt, quietly and conversationally, is genuinely chilling.
His chemistry with Theron during the film’s strangest stretch — where the two are shackled together and have to cooperate on a climbing sequence to survive — is one of the more interesting things the film does. Two people who are trying to kill each other, forced to work together on a cliff face, with both of them knowing exactly what happens when they reach the top.
Baltasar Kormákur Knows This Territory
Baltasar Kormákur is an Icelandic director who has built a very specific career around survival stories in extreme environments. His credits include Everest (2015), Adrift (2018), and Beast (2022). He also directed the well-regarded Contraband (2012) and 2 Guns (2013).
Apex is firmly in his survival mode — and he is clearly comfortable there. The Blue Mountains of New South Wales give him exactly what he needs: ravines, rapids, dense bush, vertical cliff faces. The film looks spectacular throughout.
VFX work was handled by Framestore — who previously worked with Kormákur on both Beast and Everest — alongside ILM, Rising Sun Pictures, Union VFX and Host VFX. The visual effects are deployed with restraint, which is the right call. This film works best when it feels physical and practical.
The script by Jeremy Robbins was picked up by Netflix in February 2024 as a spec script, before any of the cast was attached. Charlize Theron came on board in July 2024, Taron Egerton joined in November 2024, and Eric Bana followed in January 2025. Principal photography began in Sydney and the Blue Mountains in February 2025.
The behind-the-scenes timeline is tight — from screenplay acquisition to Netflix release was just over two years. For a film with this level of location shooting and physical production, that is a fast turnaround.
What Critics Said
Apex currently holds 65% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 74 critic reviews and a 57 out of 100 on Metacritic, which the site categorises as “mixed or average reviews.”
The Rotten Tomatoes consensus reads that the film benefits from astonishing Australian locations and Theron’s raw athleticism while skimping on the finer details — a solid entry that does not reach the top of the survival thriller genre.
I think that is fair and slightly undersells what works about it.
Critics who pushed back on the film mostly pointed at the script. Deadline called the film predictable and felt the screenplay leaned too hard on genre clichés without earning its way past them. The Deadline review noted that Kormákur is talented enough to deserve a stronger script than the one he was working with here.
Time described the film as sometimes thrilling, often sadistically unpleasant — and acknowledged that Theron mitigates essentially every problem the material has simply by being in it.
The positive reviews focused on the pacing, Theron’s performance, and the location photography. The Hollywood Reporter called it a bracingly nasty action thriller, praised the setting, and positioned it comfortably within Kormákur’s body of work.
You can read the full range of critical opinions at Rotten Tomatoes.
What Works
The pacing is exceptional. At 95 minutes, Apex never loses momentum. Kormákur gets out of his own way and lets the terrain and the performances do the work.
Theron is simply magnetic. She is one of a small number of actors who can make pure physical survival cinema feel emotionally rich at the same time. Every scene where Sasha is calculating her next move, you see both the survival brain and the grief brain working simultaneously. That is not in the script. That is what Theron brings on top of the script.
The Australian locations are extraordinary. The Blue Mountains sequences in particular give the film a scale that justifies the premise — this is wilderness that genuinely feels like it could kill you regardless of whether anyone was hunting you.
Egerton’s restraint as Ben is the right creative choice. A louder, campier villain would have undermined everything Theron was doing. His quiet certainty makes him far more believable as a threat.
The tandem climbing sequence near the end — Sasha and Ben shackled together, both knowing exactly what the other is planning — is the film’s best extended sequence. It is tense, clever, and completely in keeping with Sasha’s character that she wins it through technical skill rather than brute force.
What Does Not Quite Work
The cannibalism mythology around Ben is underdeveloped. The film tells you what he believes but never goes deep enough into it for the character to feel fully formed outside of the hunt sequences. He is an excellent threat and a slightly thin person.
The script’s early scenes with the hunters at the bay feel like setup for a confrontation that never comes. They create tension and then disappear, which is technically fine but leaves a slightly unresolved feeling.
Some of the survival decisions Sasha makes stretch credibility even by the generous standards of the genre. The bear trap scene in particular requires a certain willingness to suspend disbelief that not every viewer will extend.
The Metacritic score of 57 reflects real critical reservations that the film is not entirely able to argue its way past. If you came in looking for psychological depth and thematic ambition alongside the action, Apex will not fully satisfy you.
How It Compares to Other 2026 Netflix Action Films
Netflix has had a strong 2026 in the survival thriller and action space. Apex follows War Machine — the Alan Ritchson military sci-fi film that pulled 118 million views in its first five weeks — as another major streaming success built around a single committed star in an extreme physical situation. You can read our full breakdown of War Machine (2026) if that sounds like your kind of film.
Both films represent the same thing: well-cast, well-shot genre cinema that finds its biggest audience on streaming rather than in cinemas — and delivers exactly what it promises to the people who show up for it.
For more Hollywood action and thriller coverage, browse everything we are tracking in our Hollywood section at HDMovies4U.
Where to Watch
Apex is streaming exclusively on Netflix globally. It has been available since April 24, 2026, and is currently one of the platform’s most-watched films of the year.
My Final Verdict
Apex is a lean, beautifully shot survival thriller that works almost entirely because of Charlize Theron and almost despite its script.
Taron Egerton is a genuinely unsettling villain. The Blue Mountains of Australia are a spectacular setting. Baltasar Kormákur knows exactly how to build and sustain tension through terrain. At 95 minutes, it never overstays its welcome.
The script could have been sharper. The villain’s mythology could have been deeper. A few of the survival beats are genre-standard in ways that an actor of Theron’s calibre slightly outgrows.
But 100 million views in a month does not lie. This film delivers what it promises — brutal, intense, beautifully shot survival cinema with one of the best action stars working today at the centre of every frame.
My rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars. Not the apex of survival thrillers. But Charlize Theron absolutely is.
Check the full cast and crew on the IMDB page for Apex (2026).Share
