Forget 'Send Help,' Your Next Favorite Survival Thriller Hits Streaming This April

Sam Raimi’s Send Help was a well-received throwback to the Spider-Man director’s low-fi (or at least lower-fi) roots, much like 2009’s excellently mean-spirited Drag Me to Hell, and it smartly capitalized on a recent trend of survival thriller movies. It has a 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and made $94 million, because audiences are in the mood for movies about people overcoming terrible experiences these days. Now Netflix is going to hop on the trend in April with the upcoming survival thriller Apex.

Starring Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton, Apex was directed by Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur — who also made the harrowing survival movie Everest. Unlike that movie’s grounded, real-life story, Apex is about a woman who goes on a wilderness adventure and is stalked by a killer. It’ll be available on Netflix on April 24.

Why Are Survival Thrillers So Popular Now?

Maybe it’s because the average movie-watcher spent a year or so inside their home in the not-so-distant past, but people seem drawn to stories about being trapped in dangerous situations and surviving impossible odds. It’s the thrill of being out in nature paired with the thrill of proving the depths of your inner strength, all in the name of the kind of “what would I do in this situation?” fantasy that everyone has considered once or twice while watching a movie. It could also be a reaction to superhero movies, since those are all about special people doing special things, whereas survival movies are generally about normal people doing special things.

Another strength of survival thrillers is how malleable the genre is. Apex positions the desperate survivor as the hero, but Send Help was about a woman realizing how much she thrived in a survival situation and using it to her advantage to torment someone who terrorized her in her normal life. And yet both movies fit into the same genre! Survival thrillers can be about the excitement of someone surviving (humanity is great), or they can be about the schadenfreude of watching someone fail at surviving (nature is great), or, in the case of Apex and Send Help, they can simply be about how Charlize Theron and Rachel McAdams are great.

What Are the Best Recent Survival Thriller Movies?

The survival thriller genre has blown up in the last few years, and Netflix has a handful of notable ones beyond the upcoming Apex: J.A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow is based on a true story about the members of a rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes Mountains in the ‘70s. The Swimmers is another one based on a true story, focusing on two Syrian refugees who helped guide a boat of other refugees across the Aegean Sea. Going a little further back, there was the smash-hit Bird Box, which was at least about surviving a tough situation even if it wasn’t so much about the wilderness.

Outside of Netflix, there’s Ridley Scott’s The Martian (based on a book by Project Hail Mary’s Andy Weir, of course) and Alien, because what is outer space if not the ultimate wilderness? Good survival thrillers also tend to be huge for the people who make them, like Cast Away, The Revenant, and 127 Hours. Perhaps every great director has a survival thriller in them? Saving Private Ryan is about surviving war, if that counts, and GoodFellas is about surviving the mob, so there are Spielberg and Scorsese.