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Kiah Roache-Turner’s Beast of War arrives like a rogue wave—unexpected, muscular, and undeniably mythic—crashing through the increasingly stagnant shallows of contemporary creature features. What begins as a seemingly traditional World War II drama about camaraderie and the corrosion of innocence in young men swerves, boldly and almost wickedly, into a delirious genre hybrid: a survival thriller in which a handful of Australian soldiers must fend off a ravenous great white shark after their ship is obliterated by enemy fire. It is, improbably, both a study in tension and a lamentation for the horrors that swallow men whole—whether forged by nations or by nature.
Roache-Turner, best known for the kinetic apocalypse of Wyrmwood and the gonzo creature mischief of Sting, opens his latest film with a lyrical deception. In a Byron rainforest, a unit of fresh-faced recruits jog, joke, flirt, and dream their way toward deployment. It’s the sort of soft-focus prologue that classic war cinema has trained us to associate with the fragile brightness before the storm. Among them are Will (Joel Nankervis), all naïve ambition and wide-eyed promise, and Leo (Mark Coles Smith), the film’s stoic heart—a Nyikina soldier whose competence and dignity are tempered by relentless racism from within his own ranks. A third figure, Des Kelly (Sam Delich), slouches through these scenes with sneering menace, the sort of soldier who confuses cruelty for authority.
The film’s early training sequence crystallizes its emotional architecture. When Will slips into a mud pit—actually a vat of ground organic coffee, a behind-the-scenes detail that feels like quintessential Roache-Turner mischief—Leo risks reprimand to save him. In this moment, the film establishes not only the men’s bond, but Leo’s fundamental ethos: decency as defiance, humanity as rebellion. It’s the lesson beat into the troops’ heads—“never leave a man behind”—but here it resonates deeper. Leo is a First Nations soldier earning one-third the pay of his white peers and still expected to embody the highest ideals of military honor. His rescue of Will is both a duty and a moral stance, a quiet refusal to shrink beneath prejudice.
Then the ship explodes, and Beast of War reveals its true shape.
The survivors cling to a twisted drift of metal, their world reduced to a trembling disc of rust and fear. Roache-Turner keeps the camera locked in with the men, resisting the cheap spectacle of sky-wide shots and grandiose flourishes. The ocean becomes a mutable character—glistening, indifferent, infinite. It’s here, in this claustrophobic mid-ocean purgatory, that the shark appears, and the film sinks its teeth not only into flesh but into form.
The debut of the creature is executed with an almost reverent homage to Jaws: a slow breach, a cavernous maw, the glint of relentless appetite. Viewers familiar with the patchy CGI that hobbles so many low-budget shark films may be stunned to learn that the beast—nicknamed Shazza—is the most advanced animatronic great white ever built. Formation Effects, a Brisbane-based company, sculpted her with a precision that makes the shark’s physicality feel eerily authentic. Shazza’s presence electrifies the film; we feel the water tremble before she does. When Roache-Turner affixes a shattered air raid siren to her fin—giving the shark the banshee wail of a wounded bomber—he invents something close to cinematic poetry: a mechanical monster haunted by the machinery of human warfare.
But the brilliance of Beast of War lies in Roache-Turner’s refusal to treat the men as mere chum. Each character carries his own fissures—subtle tragedies that surface in quiet moments between panic attacks and desperate strategies. One soldier’s brain injury renders his choices unpredictable, lending the film a nerve-wracking undercurrent: sometimes the greatest danger on the raft isn’t the shark circling below, but the minds fraying above. Roache-Turner allows banter, gallows humor, and outright silliness to punctuate the carnage, understanding that relief is part of realism. Even in the darkest theaters of war, soldiers laugh; sometimes laughter is the only buoy they have left.
Mark Coles Smith gives the film its backbone. His Leo is a study in emotional economy—a man forged in hardship, refusing to descend to the level of those who diminish him. When Des dishes out racist abuse, Leo’s restraint becomes its own kind of defiance, a dignified counterweight to the ugliness that Australia has yet to exorcise from its national psyche. Smith’s interplay with the younger Will evokes the older-brother dynamic he cultivated on other sets; it tempers the film’s brutality with a subtle tenderness. In flashbacks, Aswan Reid deepens Leo’s backstory, hinting at griefs that trail him like shadows in the surf.
The film also situates itself in the fraught context of First Nations service during both world wars—men who fought courageously for a country that did not consider them equal. This historical undercurrent gives Beast of War a political spine that distinguishes it from its pulpier cousins. When Leo stands as the film’s moral and literal center of gravity, his heroism functions as both representation and rebuke. As Smith has said, with far-right movements emboldened and Indigenous communities under strain, seeing an Aboriginal protagonist lead with integrity is not merely refreshing—it is necessary.
Despite its thematic heft, Beast of War never luxuriates in self-importance. At a taut 87 minutes, the film is propelled by a mechanical confidence reminiscent of the very shark it showcases: it knows what it wants and how to get it. The violence is unflinching—grenade impacts, severed limbs, oceans clouded with blood—but never gratuitous. Roache-Turner’s gore has purpose; each burst of carnage underscores the fragility of the human body and the sheer absurdity of sending young men toward death, whether by bullets or by teeth.
The production itself has its own saga. In order to shoot Shazza convincingly, the crew constructed a 40-meter tank containing two million liters of water—an audacity that borders on madness given the film’s indie budget. Volume screens projected dogfighting planes onto the water’s surface, binding the soldiers’ quiet hell to the sky’s roaring chaos. It is this relentless ingenuity—this refusal to let constraints shrink imagination—that makes the film feel so alive.
When the final credits roll, Beast of War lingers not simply as a shark thriller well-told but as a war story refracted through an unexpected lens. It forces viewers to confront the overlapping violences that define conflict: the violence nations unleash, the violence men inflict on one another, and the violence that lies in wait beneath the surface, indifferent to human agendas.
Roache-Turner has done something rare: he has crafted a genre mash-up that honors both its influences and its ambitions. Beast of War may make you think twice before dipping a toe into the surf, but it may also make you wonder about the young men who go to war dreaming of glory, only to find themselves battling monsters—human and otherwise—on every horizon.
