Crew
Director/Screenplay – Kiah Roache-Turner, Producers – Chris Brown & Blake Northfield, Photography – Mark Wareham, Music – Francois Tetaz, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jack Mason, Visual Effects – Resin, Shark Created by Formation Effects (Creative Director – Steve Boyle), Special Effects Supervisor – Julian Summers, Makeup Design – Natalie Stanfield, Production Design – Esther Rosenberg. Production Company – Bronte Pictures.
Cast
Mark Coles Smith (Leo), Joel Nankervis (Will), Maximillian Johnson (Pete), Lee Tiger Halley (Teddy), Sam Paronsson (Thompson), Tristan McKinnon (Bobby), Aswan Reid (Archie), Sam Delich (Des), Steve Le Marquand (Sergeant), Masa Yamaguchi (Commander Tetsuo Harada), Lauren Grimson (Hazel), Lauren Brogan Brown (Susan)
Plot
In 1942 in the midst of World War II, the Aborigine Leo joins a group of other Australian soldiers in training. They are sent off to serve in the war effort only for their ship to be bombed by a Japanese plane and sunken in the East Timor Sea. Leo and several others are able to get to safety on a piece of floating debris. As they drift through a fog bank waiting to be rescued, they are hunted by a shark.
Australian director Kiah Roache-Turner had a modest festival hit with the zombie film Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (2014). He next went on to make Nekrotronic (2018) about demon hunters, before returning to follow up his previous success with Wyrmwood: Apocalypse (2021) and the giant spider film Sting (2024). Beast of War was Roache-Turner’s fifth film as director.
With Beast of War, Roache-Turner takes on the shark survival film. There have been assorted Killer Shark films ever since Jaws (1975). While most shark films these days seem to be going as ridiculous as possible in the vein of Sharknado (2013), there is another growing strand that focuses on the survival aspect in shark-infested waters. Open Water (2003) presaged a moved towards a more realistic treatment with a plot about a couple surrounded by sharks after being abandoned on a scuba-diving expedition. Other examples include The Reef (2010), The Shallows (2016), 47 Meters Down (2017) and sequel, Adrift (2017), Great White (2021), Maneater (2022), The Requin (2022), Shark Bait (2022), Shark Waters (2022), The Black Demon (2023), Blind Waters (2023), The Last Breath (2024), Shark Warning (2024), Something in the Water (2024), Fear Below (2025), Great White Waters (2025), Into the Deep (2025), The Bay (2026), Chum (2026) and Deep Water (2026). Beast of War claims to be based on a true story – one is immediately reminds of the story of the survivors of the U.S.S. Indianapolis that was memorably recounted by Robert Shaw in Jaws.
Kiah Roche-Turner’s films often feel like they are comic-book movies. Not so much adaptations but in the sense that the way they are directed feels like comic-panels filled with dialogue that is onomatopoeia in balloons. You wonder how such an approach would sit with something realistic such as a film that is based on a true story. I had a good many hopes for Beast of War – that Kiah Roche-Turner would generate a work that stood up there with other Australian works of harsh survival horror such as Andrew Traucki’s The Reef or Greg McLean’s Rogue (2007). I came away disappointed.
As it opens, Beast of War throws us into several minutes of war training scenes. This feels like Roche-Turner is going full Full Metal Jacket (1987) on us, albeit without Stanley Kunrick’s sense of black humour, as the recruits are placed through extreme levels of rigour and punishment, alongside assorted pranking around and play. However, the only thing that comes through is that Roche-Turner seems to be in admiration of such he-man rituals. He posits his hero Mark Coles Smith as a Crocodile Dundee archetype – someone who triumphs and rises above the other hotheads because of his innate bushcraft and inner toughness. Quite what purpose this set-up serves in the rest of the film is not clear. Certainly, Beast of War makes fascinating contrast to Dangerous Animals (2025), another Australian film that came out the same year, where such a tough, individualistic character is depicted as a serial killer who gets his kicks feeding his victims to the sharks.
Kiah Roche-Turner certainly gets a jump with the unexpected first appearance of the sharks and thereafter as the complement of the survivors is slowly winnowed down as the men are dragged overboard by the sharks. There are assorted other pieces of tension such as scenes where Mark Coles Smith’s attempts to jump across several pieces of debris to get to the other boat.
However, the one-dimensional caricatures that Roache-Turner prefers tend to work against doing this grimly real survival drama and the film’s opportunities fritter away. There is a surface competence to the tension generated, but the rest of Beast of War feels as though the barrage of Aussie colloquialism drains believability from the film. Some of the scenes between the stranded men – the cry of outrage “You ate the peaches?” or a scene where the men stand up in turn to drink their own urine – end up being ones that cause the show to collapse into risibility.
Trailer here