Given how many low-budget shark movies are released each year, it’s a testament to the enduring perfection of Jaws that we keep getting more – and that some of them even manage to be pretty good. Beast of War, the Fantastic Fest North American premiere from filmmaker Kiah Roache-Turner, is one such example, channeling the director’s background in grindhouse cinema into a polished burst of practical action. Leaning into that most underappreciated subgenre of horror (soldiers versus monsters), Beast of War is a shining example of how to turn a simple concept into one of the stronger creature features you’ll see all year.
At the height of World War 2, Australia and its citizens find themselves on the front lines of the Pacific theater. Leo (Mark Coles Smith), an Indigenous soldier, fights a battle on two fronts. While he and his squad learn how to be deadly soldiers during basic training, Leo also draws the ire of his fellow countrymen, who are so fixed in their old-world racism that they struggle to accept Leo as one of their own. But Leo proves himself an exceptional soldier, taking the uncoordinated Will (Joel Nankervis) under his wing and forcing the rest of the squad to treat him with a grudging acceptance.
With a renewed sense of brotherhood, the men soon set off to war – but a surprise attack from Japanese fighters sinks their carrier, leaving only a handful of survivors clinging to the wreckage in the open ocean. To make matters worse, the men soon discover a great white shark darting between the debris, waiting to pick off any soldier foolish enough to stand too close to the platform edge. If the soldiers are going to make it home, they will need to take their cues from Leo, whose background on the sea might be the only chance they have.
I have a simple philosophy when it comes to survival movies: the more purgatorial you make them, the better. Most survival movies position their characters in a liminal state between life and death, and so it makes sense that these films would adopt a complimentary visual language. Roache-Turner understands this. Most of Beast of War exists in a literal and metaphorical twilight; the survivors’ attempts to peer into the sky or under the water only result in vague smears of shapes and movement. The haze beyond the raft allows Roache-Turner to hint at the shape of a bigger war without blowing up the budget beyond a rubber shark and an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
And if this sounds like faint praise, trust me, it’s not. Most creature features are not doomed by an overreliance on digital effects, but rather, an inability to pad the space between their story beats with anything worth watching. We know that most of the men who survive the initial attack will not make it to the end of the movie – creature features are almost always horror by attrition – but those deaths combined can only take up a few minutes of screen time. It’s the creeping desperation that keeps things in motion, and the opacity of Beast of War gives it a sense of style that strongly complements the narrative.
To put it bluntly: Beast of War looks like it gives a shit how it looks, and that automatically vaults it into the upper echelon of independent shark features.
It should be noted that the film does squeeze every last drop from its overlocked production design. Smart choices are everywhere – perhaps the film’s most creative is a damaged air raid siren jammed into the shark’s dorsal fin. From then on out, whenever the shark circles the boat, the survivors hear an haunting shriek of noise as the machine’s gears choke the siren to nothing. This introduces a supernatural element to the creature feature that is equal parts ridiculous and inspired. Roache-Turner built his career on grindhouse horror like Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead Nekrotronic, and the little touches of silliness – a monster siren, an extended scene about drinking urine – make this more than just a dour exercise in death.
The film also benefits from some strong performances. Horror has always been the genre of newcomers; so too are war films, which can often translate a collection of fresh-faced young talent into the next wave of Hollywood stars (see Brothers, Band of). What that means for Beast of War is that we never feel the lack of established talent. Coles Smith proves himself a strong leading man – balancing both the heavy and silly story beats with aplomb – but the entire cast captures the ensemble camaraderie needed to make war films shine. While the sameness of their physicality can sometimes lead to a bit of confusion around who, exactly, was just eaten by a shark, that’s just the price we pay for watching young men die in a World War 2 film.
Beast of War may not be a movie with a lot of surprises, but that’s more feature than bug with this type of horror film. We don’t need Roache-Turner and company to reinvent the shark onscreen – we just need a movie that executes at a high level and has a clear vision for the kind of creature feature it wants to be. Beast of War is a serious movie made by historically unserious filmmakers, and that balance between too much and just enough turns out to be the right cocktail for this historical creature feature. [3.5/5]
