Netflix's action-thriller Apex looks like a pure horror movie

2 hours ago 2

Published Mar 25, 2026, 10:03 AM EDT

The first Apex trailer does look thrilling, but Taron Egerton hunting a woman for sport is pure horror

Sasha (Charlize Theron) sits with her back to a tree, her arms tied together above her head. A man (Taron Egerton) holding a metal basket with something inside leans close to her. From Netflix's Apex

The first trailer for Netflix's upcoming movie Apex arrived Wednesday, and it looks intense — a riff on the endlessly adapted short story The Most Dangerous Game, where a predatory, amoral person hunts human prey through the wilds for sport. Charlize Theron is the prey here, a thrill-seeker named Sasha who's heading for a challenging whitewater rafting site when a stranger (Taron Egerton, from the Kingsman movies) steals her gear, offers her a head start, and starts hunting her down.

"Hunting humans for sport" horror stories go way back, and this trailer echoes a few classics — in coding Egerton's character as a redneck who knows the forests and Sasha as an outsider who doesn't know the danger she's in, Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur (who helmed the Idris Elba creature-feature Beast) and screenwriter Jeremy Robbins (the Purge TV series) seem to be tapping into John Boorman's survival classic Deliverance. But the chase itself, across a raging river, down a waterfall, and through close-up physical confrontations where Sasha fights her opponent's physical strength, feel more like recent Predator movies, or the recent Predator-like alien-invasion movie War Machine, with a more human adversary.

Netflix is coding Apex as an action-thriller, but it looks much more like a horror movie. "Malicious man stalks and/or physically threatens seemingly vulnerable woman, who has to be resourceful to survive" is another old, familiar trope. But it's seen in horror more often than in action, in movies ranging from straight slashers like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (there's just a little DNA from that movie here as well) or Halloween to radical subversions like Barbarian or Strange Darling. The main difference here may just be how physically intense the chase gets. We'll find out when Apex hits Netflix on April 24.

Read Entire Article