1942. A warship carrying hundreds of Australian soldiers across the Timor Sea to the frontline of WW2 is sunk by Japanese fighter planes, leaving a handful of raw recruit soldiers adrift on a makeshift raft in treacherous, shark-infested waters. Can they work together to survive, or will the various tensions between them prove as fatal as the apex predators circling beneath them.
Grimmfest Says: Essentially Quint’s USS Indianapolis speech from JAWS expanded into a feature, this further fictionalises the real-life events that inspired the speech, making the protagonists ANZAC soldiers, not US Navy, and contextualising their struggle for survival as a kind of baptism of fire, following on from the lessons learned – and the tensions spawned – during the basic training scenes of the opening act. The end result plays like an unlikely mix of JAWS and GALLIPOLI, with perhaps a nod to Hitchcock’s classic survival at sea thriller, LIFEBOAT. It’s a film with a keen understanding of genre, recognising that JAWS is at heart an old school Hawksian “professional men on a mission” narrative, and doubling down on that idea by adding novice soldiers to the mix, who have to learn the kind of platoon teamwork their NCOs have tried to drill into them if they are going to have any hope of survival. And that’s a very big if. Nail-bitingly tense, emotionally gripping, and at times genuinely shocking, this is a masterclass in claustrophobic closed space tension on the wide open sea, offering both a powerful exploration of professionalism under pressure, and a crowd-pleasingly bloody no-nonsense big shark thriller.