The Charlize Theron / Taron Egerton Netflix thriller is divisive on tropes and pacing. The cinematography, courtesy of Oscar nominee Lawrence Sher, is not.
The reaction to Netflix’s new survival thriller Apex depends entirely on which critic you ask. Some are calling it a brisk, white-knuckle B-movie elevated by Charlize Theron’s physicality. Others are calling it familiar genre work that wastes a great premise on familiar beats. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score is currently underwhelming. The streaming numbers, though, are massive — Apex hit number one on Netflix’s global charts within hours of its April 24 drop.
But there’s one thing nearly every review of Apex — positive, mixed, or otherwise — agrees on: the movie looks incredible.
That’s not an accident. The cinematographer is Lawrence Sher, ASC, and watching him work a 90-degree Norwegian rock face and an Australian outback river system is genuinely something different.
The Critics On The Cinematography
Variety’s Guy Lodge praised “Sher’s splendid cinematography, alternating National Geographic-scale scene-setting with rollicking, propulsive motion when the chase is on” in his review. Roger Ebert’s site called Apex a gorgeously shot pictureabout survival and fortitude. Film Feeder went further: “Lawrence Sher’s cinematography captures everything with such a stunning sense of scope that it almost feels criminal that this is a Netflix exclusive rather than a big-screen event.” The Cosmic Circus, in an otherwise mixed review, noted that Sher’s camerawork is “far more playful and expressive” than previous Kormákur pictures.
Even reviews that dinged the script took time to single out the visuals. The IBTimes Australia review noted that Kormákur and Sher “capture the Australian wilderness with sweeping drone shots and deep, textured colors that make the landscape both beautiful and intimidating.”
When critics agree on something this consistently across an otherwise divided response, it’s worth paying attention to.
Who Is Lawrence Sher?
Sher is one of those cinematographers who’s been quietly assembling a wildly impressive résumé for two decades. He’s an American DP, born 1970, who came up shooting commercials and music videos before landing his first major feature on Zach Braff’s Garden State (2004). From there, he became Todd Phillips’ go-to camera collaborator — The Hangovertrilogy, Due Date, War Dogs, and ultimately Joker (2019), which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography. He lost to Roger Deakins for 1917, but the nomination cemented him as a top-tier name. He’s also got Godzilla: King of the Monsters, I Love You, Man, The Dictator, and Father Figures (which he directed himself) on his list.
Look at that filmography and you’ll notice something interesting: Sher is primarily a comedy guy and an urban-grit guy. He shoots Las Vegas, Brooklyn, suburban New Jersey, the streets of Gotham. He’s a master of artificial light, neon, sodium-vapor amber, the cyan-and-orange palette he’s been doing since Dan in Real Life. What he hasn’t done much of, until Apex, is wilderness.
That’s part of what makes his work here distinctive. Sher is bringing the visual instincts of a comedy and character-drama DP — a guy who knows how to read faces, how to hold on a reaction, how to use color to tell you what a scene means before the dialogue does — into a genre that usually gets handed to specialists in landscape photography. The result is a survival thriller that looks both vast and intimate at the same time. The Australian wilderness gets the National Geographic treatment, but the close-quarters tension between Theron’s Sasha and Egerton’s Ben gets the kind of psychological camerawork you’d expect from a Joker follow-up.
The Sequences People Are Talking About
The opening of Apex is the moment that’s been getting the loudest reaction online. Sasha and her husband Tommy (Eric Bana) wake up inside a tent affixed to the 90-degree face of Norway’s Troll Wall, with thousands of feet of empty air beneath them. As Roger Ebert’s review put it, audiences are dropping their jaws within the first minute. It’s a setup straight out of Cliffhanger (1993), shot with the gravitational anxiety of Free Solo (2018), and it sets the visual ambition for everything that follows. (Worth noting: Kormákur’s previous credit Everest gave him a serious foundation in this kind of vertical, weather-exposed environment, and Sher clearly leaned on the director’s instincts for it.)
The middle stretch of the film leans into Australian wilderness shots — the moment many viewers, including more than one we’ve talked to, point to as the visual high point: Theron’s Sasha standing on a high rock outcrop, taking in the full scale of how alone she is. It’s the kind of shot that requires planning, weather, and patience. A drone could fake it. Sher’s version doesn’t feel faked.
The kayaking sequences are the third big visual showcase. Critics across the board have called them kinetic and propulsive — water-level shots, drone passes, GoPro-style intimacy with Theron getting battered by rapids. Apex was shot largely on location in New South Wales, and it shows. The wilderness isn’t a backdrop. It’s a character.
Why This Matters
The current era of streaming-first action filmmaking has produced a lot of forgettable-looking content. Movies that exist to autoplay between two prestige series, shot flat and lit with the brightness algorithm tuned for phone screens. Apex isn’t that. It’s a movie that was clearly composed with the assumption that someone, somewhere, would be watching it on a real screen.
The film’s overall reception is going to land where it lands — some critics will call it derivative, others will call it a tightly-built B-movie throwback. That argument will play out in the comments. But the visual craft of Apex is among the better-shot Netflix originals of the year, and Lawrence Sher deserves the recognition critics are quietly handing him.
If you’ve been watching Apex and thinking the cinematography is doing real work — you’re not imagining it. The pros are seeing it too.
