Charlize Theron and ‘Apex’ briefly captures the terror of adventuring alone while female
The new Netflix movie Apex gives Charlize Theron another opportunity to be an adrenaline junky.
We know she can throw a kick and land a punch thanks to movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde, but this outdoorsy thriller has her rock climbing and kayaking, too. She also does her fair share of swimming, running, and pepper-spraying, because, to put it mildly, her character is going through it.
Theron plays Sasha, an outdoor adventurer who is struck by tragedy while climbing the 1,100 metres of Troll Wall in Norway. She takes her grief to Australia, as one does, with the intention of white water kayaking a technical section of river in a remote national park. Shortly after arriving in the area, she meets Ben, a muscly local who sells jerky at the petrol station and calls out several hunters for harassing her. Later, Sasha drives to a camping spot for the night before setting out on the river, only to have her solitude interrupted by the hunters again.
The movie quickly spirals into a horror-adjacent cat-and-mouse game that lands somewhere between The Most Dangerous Game and Psycho, but before that, there is a solid 15 minutes that capture a very real terror: being a woman on her own in the wilderness. Sasha wants to be by herself. She is a ferociously competent adventurer and has no doubts about her ability to traverse a harrowing river by herself. But when the headlights explode in the peace of her remote campsite, she is just another woman, alone, surrounded by predatory men.
For any woman who finds purpose and excitement in the outdoors, this moment is all too familiar. Sasha can scale one of the toughest climbs in the world and thread her way through white water rapids, but she’s no match for a random group of men who want to harm her. There is nothing more depressing than seeing a woman fall asleep cradling a can of pepper spray because some guys decided to camp next to her.
Men who seek adventure in the outdoors are almost certainly more afraid of the environment than of other men. There’s a reason the trope is called “man versus nature”. They are there to conquer what scares them. For women, that fear pales in comparison to the prospect of being alone in the wilderness and encountering a man with bad intentions.
This is elegantly expressed in this otherwise blunt instrument of a film when Sasha finally leaves her car and the men behind and takes to the river. Smashing through rapids, narrowly dodging boulders, and leaping, like a raindrop, into a pool of pristine water, she smiles for perhaps the first time since the events in Norway. She is free in this place, we recognise. She isn’t trying to overcome her challenging surroundings; she is revelling in them.
You can’t fault a movie for not being what you wanted it to be, but it’s hard not to feel a little bit irritated when Apex shifts gears shortly after this moment and launches straight into bizarro psycho killer territory with diminishing returns. There are plenty of movies that show women being hunted through the wilderness, but there aren’t enough that explore the cruel irony of being physically fit enough to enjoy the most rugged parts of nature, only to be imperilled by a man.
Perhaps that story is simply too depressing to be entertaining.
