What happens at the end of Apex? The final fall mirrors the one that opens the film

Netflix's Apex is not a complicated film, and thank goodness for that. Charlize Theron climbs things, Taron Egerton hunts her with a crossbow through the Australian bush, and somewhere in between there's jerky you'll regret hearing about. But the ending is doing something rather clever with its simplicity — and it all hinges on two falls.

The first fall: Norway, and a rope she didn't want to let go

The film opens on Norway's Troll Wall, where Sasha (Theron) and her husband Tommy (Eric Bana) are caught in an avalanche mid-descent. Tommy plummets, and Sasha is forced to release his dead weight or die with him. She doesn't choose it. The mountain chooses for her. Cue five months of grief and a solo trip to Australia, where a helpful local named Ben (Egerton) recommends a scenic route that turns out to be his personal hunting ground.

A quick recap of what Sasha survives before the finale:

• a timed head start soundtracked by The Chemical Brothers, because Ben is a psychopath with a playlist;
• crossbow bolts, a bear trap and an underground lair wallpapered with other people's misfortune;
• the revelation about what, precisely, goes into Ben's home-made jerky (she ate some — she will be processing that in therapy);
• a white-water plunge whilst literally tied to the man trying to kill her.

The second fall: this time, she lets go on purpose

The pair land at the bottom of a ravine, Ben's leg wrecked, and the only way out is a tandem climb — the exact arrangement that killed Tommy. Sasha hauls Ben up the cliff, realises he will never stop hunting her, and detaches his harness. He drops. The film opens with a fall she couldn't prevent and closes with one she engineers, which is about as tidy as thematic bookending gets.

"It's really a story about survival, not just physically but emotionally," Theron told Netflix's Tudum.

She wasn't acting the exhaustion at the top, either. That summit collapse into tears-slash-laughter was real, after a climb that took her 38 minutes to shoot for 30 seconds of screen time. Screenwriter Jeremy Robbins, for his part, told The Hollywood Reporter the studio put proper muscle behind his little survival script:

"Charlize climbed a billboard in Times Square to promote it."

The actual final shot: Sasha on a beach, tossing Tommy's lucky compass into the surf with a kiss. She reported the bodies, she survived the hunt, and she has finally stopped carrying a dead man's luck around. Roll credits, book a climbing lesson, never accept jerky from strangers.