Tyler Atkins makes plain, physical films about Australian men trying to be better than they were, and he makes them carefully. What he has not yet made is one that surprises us. Beast is decent; the next one needs an idea of its own.
Fi1m perspective
When Patton (Daniel MacPherson) steps into the cage in Beast (2026), Tyler Atkins does something a good many fight directors have stopped doing: he lets us watch. The takes are long, the choreography is practical, and when a man goes down we know which blow did it. MacPherson helps, playing the written-off fighter with a stillness the script does not always deserve. It is the director's best habit, and so far his most reliable one.
The route here was not the film-school one. Atkins started as a grip, then made shorts and music videos between 2016 and 2018, among them Andrew Stockdale: Slipstream (2018), and spent time in the writers' room and as a director's assistant on the series Shantaram under Justin Kurzel. His first feature, Bosch & Rockit (2022), which also went out as Ocean Boy, he wrote, directed and produced himself; it is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story and one of the first Australian features shot during the pandemic. Beast, which he developed over several years with Russell Crowe as co-writer and actor, was shot in Australia and Thailand, some of it in front of live crowds.
Two features is a short career, and the two have a good deal in common. Both are working-class Australian stories about men trying to become better than the circumstances that made them; both are built on a partnership or a family bond; both treat violence as something with a bill attached. Atkins has said the man he is after is one "who's in control, who protects, who gives". That is a decent thing for a filmmaker to want, and in Beast you can see him wanting it in every scene between Patton and the people in his corner.
What you cannot see is anything the genre has not shown you already. David Frigerio's script takes the road from written-off to title fight in the order you would draw it on a napkin, and Atkins directs it without apology. We sat through Beast knowing every beat before it landed, and the irritation was that the film was too carefully made to dismiss for it. His debut was received as uneven in tone; Beast has fixed the tone and kept the outline.
So the craft is there and the sincerity is not in doubt. With Thomaz Labanca shooting Beast, Atkins has shown he can stage a fight so that it reads, which is more than many directors with far longer careers can manage. The next film needs to be the one where the story does not arrive already approved. If he can find a plot he does not know the end of, we would like to see what he does with it.
Biography
Tyler Atkins is an Australian writer, director and producer. He made his feature debut with Ocean Boy (also known as Bosch & Rockit, 2022), which he wrote, directed and produced. The film premiered internationally and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Mammoth Film Festival.
Atkins directed the MMA drama Beast (2026). He previously worked on the Apple TV+ series Shantaram (2022) in the writers' room and as part of the directing team.
