Kiah Roache-Turner has never been subtle. From the splatter-punk bravado of Wyrmwood to the steel-jawed siege mentality of Nekrotronic and Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, his films have been fueled by testosterone, gallows humour, and a gleeful refusal to apologise for excess. Beast of War doesn’t abandon that DNA—it just throws it into the open ocean and strips it back to muscle, salt, and desperation.

Set during World War II, the film strands a group of young Australian soldiers on a shrinking raft in the Timor Sea after their boat goes down. There’s no grand campaign, no strategic victory to be won—just survival. The enemy comes in familiar forms: hunger, exposure, paranoia, and the creeping inevitability of death. Then there’s the shark. Big. Hungry. Patient. Circling like a debt that always comes due.

Roache-Turner approaches the material with the same bruised knuckles and dark grin that have defined his career. This is still a male, sweat-soaked pressure cooker of a film—men snapping at one another, egos flaring, leadership eroding under the sun. But where Wyrmwood leaned into anarchic mayhem, Beast of War opts for attrition. The humour is still there, sharp and irreverent, often surfacing in moments of grim resignation rather than punchline gags. A joke muttered through cracked lips. A laugh that dies halfway out of the mouth.

Visually, the film punches well above its weight. The cinematography makes art out of scarcity: endless blue horizons that feel less like freedom and more like a prison, sun-bleached skin rendered almost raw, the raft shrinking not just physically but psychologically. The production design understands that less is more—the sea doesn’t need dressing, and the raft becomes both stage and coffin. For a low-budget production, Beast of War carries itself with remarkable confidence.

The shadow of Jaws looms large, and Roache-Turner doesn’t pretend otherwise. The shark is used sparingly, often implied rather than shown, its presence felt through ripples, shadows, and the soldiers’ growing dread. More telling is the film’s spiritual debt to Quint’s USS Indianapolis monologue—men trapped in open water, slowly realising the ocean doesn’t care about bravery or patriotism. Survival isn’t heroic. It’s ugly. It’s luck and endurance and the will to keep breathing one more minute than the bloke next to you.

Where Beast of War occasionally stumbles is in its character depth. The soldiers are broadly sketched—archetypes rather than fully formed men—and while that serves the film’s hard-boiled tone, it limits its emotional reach. When tempers flare or bodies slip beneath the water, the impact is felt more viscerally than personally. It’s effective, but not devastating.

Still, as a continuation of Roache-Turner’s career, Beast of War feels like a natural evolution. It tempers his bombast without sanding down his instincts, trading chainsaws and zombies for saltwater and teeth, while retaining the same irreverent edge. It’s a lean, muscular survival thriller that knows exactly what it is and never pretends to be more.

The Prognosis:

Beast of War isn’t about winning. It’s about lasting. About men pushed past bravado into something rawer and quieter. A gritty, blood-in-the-water chapter in Kiah Roache-Turner’s ongoing fascination with endurance, masculinity, and monsters—human and otherwise.

• Saul Muerte