Apex is not a thriller

This movie is labeled as a thriller on Netflix. I started watching the trailer, and thought: no way this is a thriller, this has to be a horror movie.

I was not wrong.

Despite my spidey senses tingling, I watched it without guardrails. Bad idea.

But let’s start at the beginning.

The premise should be a dead giveaway that it’s horror: Sasha loses her husband when they were rock climbing during a brutal weather event, and she had to let him drop (Vertical Limit, anyone?). Then she goes on a solo trip to Australia (think The Descent) and runs into Taron’s character, Ben (a la any human hunter movie).

Now, the setup is weird because the movie acts like the audience doesn’t know Ben is the villain when it’s marketed that way. Why throw all the red herrings? Maybe no one told marketing that it was a secret.

Ben is a psychopath: he’s a hunter after human prey. He catches, kills, and prepares…to eat them, of course. Gotta use all the parts!

He confesses later to Sasha that his mom was his first victim, so he could keep her with him always. Sasha’s led to a cave where he’s got his other catches strung up like a meat locker. And in one shot, we see two children, not alive, laying together.

Even if I thought it was horror, it wasn’t that kind of horror.

It gets worse, folks. There’s some bloody fights (several heads bumped on underwater rocks for some reason), but the worst is the climax (the apex?) of the movie where the opening is mirrored, only it’s Ben falling.

I was not prepared to witness the impact. Not as bad as Midsommar, but DAMN.

You gotta warn a person for that shit! Ugh. I can’t unsee that.

The movie wasn’t even worth it. Listen, I like Charlize & I like Taron’s singing voice (I can’t say I’ve seen a lot of his live action movies), but this was not a great movie.

It feels more like genres strung together with increasing brutality. Rock-climbing trope of a tragic on-mountain accident compels the survivor to go on other extreme adventures where they must survive some kind of wilderness horror. But the wilderness horror is paired with human hunting trope on top of cannibalism + brutal, real-life gore.

Netflix is going to scar people with that Thriller label. That is NOT a thriller: it’s a brutal survivalist horror.