Quietly Watching

  Let me be honest about what Apex is before I tell you why I watched all 95 minutes of it without looking at my phone. Apex is a survival thriller in which a woman is hunted through the Australian wilderness by a psychopathic stranger. The script, written by Jeremy Robbins, is not doing anything you haven't seen before. The villain's motivations are thin. The backstory is dispensed with quickly, almost impatiently, as though the film itself knows that nobody came here for character development. The plot moves in the direction you expect it to move, and it gets there without much surprise. And yet. Charlize Theron is in it. And that changes things. What the Film Is Actually About Sasha (Theron) is a grieving extreme sports enthusiast who travels to Australia's remote Wandarra National Park to scatter her husband's ashes after his death in a climbing accident. She meets Ben (Taron Egerton) at a gas station — friendly, slightly off, the kind of person you notice and then ...