I just finished streaming Beast of War, and I need a moment. My heart’s still racing, my palms are sweaty, and I can’t shake the images of blood-stained water and that milky-eyed monster circling its prey. Look, I might have undiagnosed thalassophobia—a deep-seated fear of the ocean and what lurks beneath—which probably explains why films like this genuinely terrify me in ways most horror movies don’t. But this isn’t just another shark movie that preys on ocean anxiety. It’s something far more profound, and I need to unpack why this modestly-budgeted Australian thriller hit me so damn hard.
The True Story That Haunts the Film
Before diving into the film itself, you need to understand the real nightmare that inspired it. On December 1, 1942, the HMAS Armidale—a Bathurst-class corvette barely five months old—was crossing the Timor Sea with 149 souls aboard. Her mission was straightforward: evacuate Australian commandos and Dutch troops from Japanese-occupied Timor while delivering relief forces. What happened next became one of Australia’s most harrowing—and until recently, largely forgotten—wartime tragedies.
Japanese aircraft spotted the corvette in daylight, and what followed was hell unleashed from the sky. Thirteen planes descended on the Armidale in waves. The ship’s young crew fought back desperately, but they were outgunned and outnumbered. Two torpedoes found their mark. The first tore through the mess deck, instantly killing most of the Dutch soldiers aboard. The second split the ship in half.
As Armidale sank beneath the waves in just three minutes, 18-year-old Ordinary Seaman Edward “Teddy” Sheean made a choice that would define heroism. Wounded in the chest and back, he strapped himself to an Oerlikon anti-aircraft gun and kept firing at the Japanese Zeroes as they strafed survivors in the water. He shot down one plane, damaged others, and gave his brothers in arms precious seconds to escape. Sheean went down with the ship, still firing. In 2020, he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for Australia.
Of the 149 men aboard, 102 initially survived the sinking. They clung to two boats, a Carley float, and a makeshift raft cobbled together from wreckage. Then the real horror began. For up to eight days, these men drifted in shark-infested waters. Sea snakes slithered between them. Japanese planes returned to strafe them. The wounded died slowly. One survivor, Stoker Ray Raymond, later recounted watching a deceased shipmate float nearby for days: “Joe Currie floated near us for days. Sometimes the sharks would nudge him from underneath and take a bit out of him, but he stuck around just the same.”
Captain David Richards made the agonizing decision to take the motorboat and row 250 kilometers toward Allied patrol routes, hoping to alert rescuers. Twenty men set out with him; two died en route. The group on the damaged whaler managed to repair it and were eventually rescued. But the men on the makeshift raft? A Catalina flying boat spotted them on December 8, photographed them waving from the wreckage. Then they vanished. Despite extensive searches, those men were never seen again. One hundred lives were lost. Forty-nine survived. And for decades, their story remained largely untold.
Kiah Roache-Turner’s Vision: Jaws Meets Gallipoli
Enter Kiah Roache-Turner, the Australian genre filmmaker behind the gloriously gonzo Wyrmwood zombie films and the creature feature Sting. When he approached Beast of War, he made a conscious choice: this wouldn’t be a somber, reverent war memorial. Instead, he wanted to honor these soldiers by creating the kind of pulpy, adrenaline-fueled survival thriller they might have actually enjoyed watching.
In interviews, Roache-Turner explained his approach: “I wanted to take three things. I wanted to take Jaws and mix it with the poetic, beautiful war pathos of a film like Gallipoli. Then make it like The Descent, where it’s a small group stuck in a small space.”
The result? A taut 87-minute pressure cooker that never lets up. The film opens with sun-drenched training sequences that establish our characters—young men flirting with nurses, sharing beers, playing sports, forming bonds. It’s deliberately gentle, almost deceptively so. Then the Zeroes scream out of the sky, and everything goes to hell in about three minutes, just like the real sinking.
What impressed me most was how Roache-Turner balanced tones without ever feeling schizophrenic. There’s genuine pathos here—moments of quiet tragedy that acknowledge the real men who died. But there’s also pitch-black Australian humor, the kind of gallows comedy that soldiers actually use to cope with horror. When the men realize they’re being hunted by a massive great white, one character suggests they name her “Shazza”—slang for Sharon, but also Australian slang for a particular type of rough-around-the-edges woman. It’s absurd and perfect and exactly the kind of thing traumatized young men would do.
The Shark Named Shazza: Why Practical Effects Matter
Here’s where Beast of War really sank its teeth into me (sorry, couldn’t resist). In an era where CGI sharks have become the cheap, forgettable norm, Roache-Turner went old school. He built a practical shark.
The production partnered with Formation Effects’ Steve Boyle and CreatureNFX’s Paul Trefry—the latter worked on Alien: Covenant and films with James Cameron and Ridley Scott—to create “Shazza,” a battle-scarred female great white designed to look like she’d “had a few run-ins with a few propellers and got into a few pub car park brawls,” as Roache-Turner put it. One eye is dead and milky. Scars crisscross her face. She’s monstrous in a way that feels earned, not cartoonish.
The filmmakers estimate 85-90% of the shark footage is practical—either a full puppet, an attack head on a rail system that explodes from the water to “munch at the actors,” or a submarine with a fin attached. CGI was only used for wider underwater shots. The difference is palpable. When Shazza breaches in slow motion, water cascading off her scarred hide, mouth agape, you feel it in your gut. Your hindbrain knows something real is happening, even if your logical mind knows it’s a puppet.
To achieve this, the production built Australia’s largest film tank—a 40-meter behemoth at Screen Queensland Studios in Brisbane. They used LED volume screens (the same technology from The Mandalorian) to create dynamic backgrounds. CO2 canisters exploded beneath the shark during attack sequences to simulate a thrashing tail. Mark Coles Smith did his own stunts, getting genuinely battered by a massive animatronic predator.
The reported budget was around $7-8 million USD—not chump change for an indie, but absolutely modest by Hollywood standards. Yet the film feels far bigger. That’s the magic of practical effects combined with smart filmmaking. Roache-Turner used fog banks, dawn light, and German Expressionist-inspired lighting (think Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula) to create atmosphere without burning through cash. The cinematography by Mark Wareham is genuinely stunning—all brooding grays, blood reds, and that sickly yellow dawn light filtering through fog.
Mark Coles Smith: The Heart of the Film
Now, let’s talk about the performance that elevates Beast of War from good to genuinely great. Mark Coles Smith, a Nyikina actor from Broome in Western Australia, plays Leo—the only Indigenous soldier among the survivors. And he’s absolutely magnetic.
Smith brings quiet gravitas to Leo, a man who’s paid one-third the wages of his white colleagues, endures racist taunts from racist soldiers like Des (Sam Delich), and yet remains unshakably committed to doing what’s right. In the opening training sequence, Leo saves young Will (Joel Nankervis) from drowning in a mud pit when others race ahead. “Never leave a man behind,” his superior officer praises. That moral core defines Leo throughout.
What struck me about Smith’s performance was its restraint. He’s not playing a saint or a symbol. Leo’s just a bloke—he swears, he drinks VB, he cracks jokes about preferring his own piss over a Queenslander’s Foster’s when they’re dying of thirst. But when crisis hits, he becomes the spine holding everyone together. Smith’s eyes convey so much: exhaustion, determination, grief for every man they lose, fury at the injustice of it all.
Roache-Turner deliberately wove Indigenous themes into the film without making them preachy. There’s a spiritual dimension to Leo’s relationship with the shark—in Western Australian Indigenous culture, great whites are considered creator gods, beings of immense power worthy of respect. Leo sees Shazza differently than his white compatriots do. It’s not just a monster to kill; it’s a force of nature that’s entered their space because war has disturbed the natural order.
The film also doesn’t shy away from the historical reality that Indigenous Australians who fought in WWII weren’t even considered citizens. They couldn’t vote. They were barred from RSL clubs when they came home. They were paid a fraction of what white soldiers earned. Leo’s story is fictional, but it represents thousands of real Indigenous servicemen whose sacrifices went unrecognized for decades.
Smith, who won AACTA Awards and became the first Indigenous Australian actor nominated for a Gold Logie for his work in Mystery Road: Origin, delivers what I’d call a career-defining performance here. The camera loves him—he’s handsome, charismatic, but never prettified. He looks weathered and real. His chemistry with Nankervis (playing the earnest young Will) is genuine and touching. Their bond becomes the emotional anchor as men die around them.
The supporting cast is uniformly strong. Sam Delich makes Des genuinely hateable without turning him into a cartoon villain—he’s racist and cowardly, but you understand he’s also terrified and out of his depth. Sam Parsonson provides unexpected comic relief as a soldier with a head injury who keeps insisting they’ll “find the board and escape that way,” a running gag that shouldn’t work but does. Joel Nankervis brings wide-eyed innocence to Will, making his character’s fate all the more affecting.
The Politics Beneath the Surface
Beast of War is sneakily political without ever feeling like a lecture. By centering an Indigenous protagonist in a WWII story, it asks uncomfortable questions: Who gets remembered? Whose sacrifices count? Why did it take until 2020 for Teddy Sheean to receive his Victoria Cross?
The film also grapples with Australian identity in ways that feel fresh. The ocker humor—the swearing, the beer references, the nicknames—is proudly, almost defiantly Australian. But it’s filtered through Leo’s perspective, an Indigenous man fighting for a country that doesn’t consider him a citizen. That tension is always present, even as the men bond through shared trauma.
There’s a moment late in the film where Des, the racist soldier, begins to see Leo differently. It’s not a redemption arc—Des doesn’t suddenly become enlightened. But survival strips away pretense. When you’re staring down a 20-foot shark together, skin color matters less than courage. It’s a small, human moment in a film full of inhuman violence.
Why This Film Works When So Many Shark Movies Don’t
Here’s the thing about shark movies: most of them suck. For every Jaws, there are fifty Sharknados and straight-to-streaming disasters with terrible CGI and worse acting. Beast of War succeeds because it respects its audience and its genre.
First, it’s economical. At 87 minutes, it knows exactly what it wants to do and wastes zero time. The pacing is relentless. You get just enough character development in the first act to care when people start dying, then the film becomes a masterclass in tension escalation.
Second, the kills matter. This isn’t a slasher film where bodies are just a body count. Every death feels like a loss. The film earns its violence through character work. When limbs are severed—and they are, graphically—it’s horrifying because you’ve grown to care about these men.
Third, the film layers threats. The shark is the primary antagonist, but there’s also dehydration, sun exposure, interpersonal conflict, and the very real possibility of Japanese planes returning. The men can’t just focus on one problem; they’re constantly triaging multiple crises. It’s exhausting to watch, in the best way.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the film has something to say. It’s not just “shark scary.” It’s about sacrifice, about who gets honored and who gets forgotten, about the specific horror of being at war—where death can come from the sky or the depths with equal randomness.
The Visceral Experience
I need to be honest: this film is gnarly. And for someone who might have thalassophobia, it’s borderline nightmare fuel. Roache-Turner doesn’t flinch from gore. Limbs are severed in excruciating detail. A grenade detonates inside a human body with nauseating results. Shazza tears men apart with brutal efficiency. There’s an air raid siren that gets attached to the shark’s fin (don’t ask how, just trust me it’s brilliant and terrifying), creating this banshee wail that announces every attack. It’s a stroke of genius—the siren that should mean “take cover” now means “death is coming from below.”
But what really got under my skin was the helplessness of it all. These men are stuck in the open ocean—that vast, indifferent expanse where you can’t see what’s beneath you, where every ripple could be your last warning. The film captures that primal terror of being in an environment where you’re not the apex predator, where you’re just meat floating in something else’s territory. The scenes shot from beneath the raft, looking up at dangling legs, made my stomach drop every time.
But the gore never feels gratuitous. It feels real in the way that Saving Private Ryan or Hacksaw Ridge feel real—this is what violence actually does to human bodies. The film respects the horror of war and the horror of nature enough to show it unflinchingly.
Final Thoughts: A Film That Deserves to Be Seen
Walking away from Beast of War, I couldn’t help but feel grateful that films like this still get made. In an era dominated by $200 million superhero spectacles, here’s a modestly-budgeted Australian thriller that puts craft, character, and creativity above spectacle. It honors a forgotten chapter of history while delivering a white-knuckle survival horror experience.
Mark Coles Smith’s performance alone makes this essential viewing. But when you combine that with Roache-Turner’s kinetic direction, the practical effects wizardry, the stunning cinematography, and a script that balances pulp thrills with genuine emotional weight, you get something special.
This isn’t just a good shark movie. It’s one of the best war horror films I’ve seen in years, sitting comfortably alongside Overlord and The Descent as genre films that transcend their B-movie premises through sheer craft and heart.
Beast of War proves that you don’t need a massive budget to create something that feels epic. You just need filmmakers who care, actors who commit, and a story worth telling. The men of the HMAS Armidale deserved to have their story told. And while this film takes significant creative liberties—making it more Jaws than documentary—it captures something essential about their experience: the terror, the camaraderie, the sheer will to survive against impossible odds.
Go watch it. Support genre filmmaking that actually gives a damn. And maybe think twice before going in the water.
Rating: 8.5/10
The film is available on streaming platforms now—and even on a smaller screen, Shazza’s practical-effects glory still packs a punch.
Historical Note: If you’re interested in learning more about the real HMAS Armidale sinking, the Australian War Memorial has extensive documentation. Teddy Sheean’s story, in particular, deserves wider recognition. His Victoria Cross citation reads: “Ordinary Seaman Sheean’s actions were an extraordinary act of valour, distinguished by the most conspicuous gallantry, and a pre-eminent act of valour and self-sacrifice in the face of the enemy.” Damn right it was.
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