Fine young cannibal
dir: Baltasar Kormákur
2026
When you ask yourself whether you can be bothered watching this flick, what you really need to be asking yourself is “do I really want to sit around for a couple of hours watching a man terrorising a woman for most of a movie’s duration before she gets her revenge / he gets his comeuppance?”
And honestly I just don’t have the strength anymore, much of the time. I don’t really want to watch anyone being terrorised, but at least for me as well it’s becoming increasing untenable to justify to myself watching stuff however transgressive it might seem or how satisfying the catharsis at the end might be.
At least, well, there must be some virtues to this flick. Let’s figure them out together!
Charlize Theron has played Amazonian, dauntless, massacrers of monstrous men before, and this isn’t one of those feral roles. She does not play her role here in Apex like Furiosa in Fury Road, or like her savage secret agent in Atomic Blonde. Mostly, because even though it would have been enjoyable (for me), it wouldn’t have made much sense in the context of the film. The character she plays here, of Sasha, is not a chrome plated bionic avenger of wronged women and children everywhere, or a super trained fashionista with lethal skills to pay the bills: She’s just a woman who likes to climb mountains and go white water rafting.
Her character was also married to an Australian, Australianly played by Australia’s Own Eric Bana. Several months before the main part of this story transpires, Sasha and her husband were scaling the Troll Wall in Norway, being all cute and charming and cuddly with each other.
And then of course her husband dies.
Not only dies, but she has to literally cut him loose in order to not be killed by his dead weight, and THEN he dies.
What guilt to carry around with you… how sad. Boo hoo. To honour her fallen companion, she decides to travel to his original stomping grounds, to honour him by doing some camping, some climbing, and some rafting.
She finds herself at the Blue Mountains, even though they’re not calling it the Blue Mountains in the movie, and everyone from the local rangers to the feral locals act like they’re trying to horrify her for the sin of being an unaccompanied woman. A woman! In the wilderness? On her own? How dare she, who does she think she is wearing pants etc etc
That starting bit in the store could have been out of, I dunno, Wake in Fright. Wolf Creek, Playing Beatie Bow. Any Aussie flick of the last sixty years trying to remind city people in general and women in particular that they don’t belong in the Outback, wherever that outback might be, would be applicable. The threat of (sexual) violence pervades the first half hour of the film (which makes it irksome in the extreme).
It doesn’t persist, because it’s eventually replaced with the threat of murder and then being turned into jerky, hopefully in that order.
‘Apex’ means the top of something, and Sasha, we believe, likes climbing to the top of things, no matter how dangerous. But, get this, the flick is about the kind of fuckhead that would think of himself and refer to himself as an ‘apex predator’, as someone who hunts humans. And so the hunt begins.
As previously mentioned, Theron doesn’t play the majority of this role as a superhuman badass: she plays the role as a regular but very outdoorsy human who just wants to spend time in nature without being hit on, threatened or hunted by a psychopath, and if the situation turns grim, she’s certainly going to do her best to survive.
We can’t always get what we want, but if we try some times, and we have elite climbing skills, we might just get what we need.
Just like all women should be even more wary of the guy who pretends to be an ally, the guy who tells the chaps harassing Sasha at the shops and then later at the camping spot where he advised her to back off, of course he happens to be the worst of the worst. Ben (Taron Egerton) is a lean, shave-headed lunatic who has been killing tourists in the national park for a while, now, and curing their corpses, and packaging the meat for sale as ‘beef’ jerky at the local shop.
How gross. Why does he do this? Well, does it really matter? All we know is he really wants to kill Sasha and Sasha really doesn’t want to die, so they’ll cat and mouse their way across the terrain, literally up hill and down dale, until one of them meets their maker in the most brutal fashion possible, and presumably the other gets to live a life of riches and book deals as the victor who reaps the spoils of survival.
Is this a flick worth watching? I can’t really say it is, in general. If you like either of the actors or the lush natural scenery of the Blue Mountains, then you might enjoy it solely on a visual level. Egerton puts in a committed, insane performance as someone who loves to hunt people, kill them and eat them, but Theron mostly acts like she’s mildly put out by all the hassle, and that’s okay too. My absolute favourite moment is when Ben does something at a certain point that would potentially put both of them in harm’s way, and she says out loud, but not emphatically “oh you fucking idiot”, but not like she’s angry, but like she’s rolling her eyes and resigned to it, because it was so expected.
It’s very strange, and slightly amusing, how much this flick is less about surviving against the odds and triumphing over evil and all that bullshit, and mostly about women in relationships with men. It’s secretly a flick about breaking up with men when the relationship is no longer sustaining you, or good for you.
In the opening minutes of the flick, before Eric Bana’s character dies, he’s telling Sasha that he thinks she goes too hard when they climb or when they do their outdoorsy stuff, and that he doesn’t have it in him anymore, and might want to stop defying death by mountain climbing no more. Of course what eventually happens isn’t really her fault, but in order to survive, in order to keep living her life the way she wants to, she has to cut him loose before he kills them both.
Towards the end of the flick, Sasha is literally put into the same situation again, albeit it with a serial killer who, whilst he admires her and respects her moxie, wants to kill and eat her (like many cis het men in long term relationships?) She literally has to make the choice of letting him kill her, letting him kill them both through his monomaniacal stupidity, or whether to cut him loose in order to survive and thrive her way.
It's… a strong message for women everywhere. If a man is not sparking joy, or enhancing your life or supporting your goals, cut him the fuck loose before he drags you both down.
And there’s some pretty scenery.
Apex is not a great film, probably not even a good film, but it’s enjoyable enough. And it doesn’t stick around too long either. 90 or so minutes was the perfect length.
Theron’s been much better in plenty of other films, but she herself enjoys rock climbing, so gets to show off some of her climbing skills, to the benefit of the movie. It’s enough, sometimes.
6 times the second a freak starts talking about his mother you know he’s a serial killer out of 10
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“Enduring pain is part of growing up, Sasha. It’s a rite of passage.” – kill him, he’s mansplaining suffering to a woman - Apex
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