In “The Peril at Pincer Point,” an eager young sound designer is willing to go fully off the deep end in the name of cinematic ingenuity — and in their impressively bananas first feature as a duo, one suspects writer-directors Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine may have done the same. Either a satire or a celebration of independent filmmaking at its most impractically intrepid, this microbudget curio wears a hotchpotch of influences on its stained, frayed sleeve — from Powell and Pressburger to grimy folk horror to the indie postmodernism of Mark Jenkin and Peter Strickland — but still maintains its own perverse, peculiar voice.
Recently premiered in the Visions strand of this year’s SXSW program, where it received the Neon-sponsored Auteur Award, “The Peril at Pincer Point” may prove too eccentric a prospect for many distributors. But it has the particular streak of inspired madness on which cult followings can be built, should word spread through the festival circuit of both its oddball charms and its considerable formal interest. As visually and aurally abundant as you’d hope for a film very much about die-hard artistry below the line, the film promises, if not immediately bigger things, at least even more elaborately weird ones from Kuhn and Stratton-Twine. The latter, also the film’s editor and composer, made his feature debut solo with last year’s comedy “Two Big Feet”; for the former, this is a freshman effort.
Both directors have made multiple shorts of their own, and “The Peril at Pincer Point” shows they’re still accustomed to the form. With its sparse storytelling and luxuriant atmospherics, this 83-minute work can feel at points like a short (or indeed a joke) stretched beyond its natural span, as its protagonist’s plainly doomed quest crab-walks in circles toward an inevitable punchline of insanity. For those on the film’s wavelength, however, the committedly loopy beauty of the vision here is strangely galvanizing: It becomes ever harder to look away from its grainy, stormy monochrome images, while its inscrutable sonic textures invite the viewer to lean in, to catch any hidden whispers.
The unmoored nature of proceedings is established upfront by an obviously fabricated quote on screen from a volume allegedly titled “Contemplating Telson & Other Lamentations,” written in shanty-style verse: We may be in a parallel reality, but it’s a richly detailed and footnoted one. Young Londoner Jim (Jack Redmayne) is awoken by the screams of his girlfriend, after she improbably spots a crab scuttling across the floor in his high-rise apartment; attempting to catch the beast, he falls foul of its claws, sustaining a wound that is eerily slow to heal.
Coincidentally or otherwise, this out-of-place sighting ties into the project on which Jim is currently working: a demented-looking human-crustacean romance in the style of a swooning Golden Age melodrama, helmed by tyrannical, puffed-up B-movie auteur P.W. Griffin (Os Leanse). Unhappy with what he hears in an early cut — all he wants is a sound mix “unprecedented in film history,” no pressure — Griffin barkingly dispatches Jim to Pincer Point, the remote British island where the film was shot, to record some new material.
In particular, Griffin wishes to capture the voice of a local woman who, once Jim arrives in this sleepy but sinister community, turns out to have recently gone missing. Not that anyone he meets much cares, save for a salty seadog (Mike Mackenzie) in the local pub (delightfully named The Fat Plankton), telling tall-sounding tales of a ghost ship whose spectral captain recruits souls from the living for his crew. Jim is less alarmed by that than he is by visions of dog-sized crabs in his bedroom, or of the comprehending ear he seems to have acquired for shellfish chatter. Either way, the more he gives in to his bizarre new surroundings, the happier Griffin is with his recordings; perfection beckons, but so does the void.
Redmayne brings a sweetly doltish everyman energy to this increasingly off-kilter affair, with much of the dialogue between him and his co-stars (including Stratton-Twine as the missing woman’s slacker brother) improvised in disarmingly shaggy fashion. But “The Peril at Pincer Point” is no haphazard goof-off on the filmmaking front: DP Murray Zev Cohen’s black-and-white compositions are precisely distressed to evoke bygone schools of low-budget cinema, or reels left to molder in archives for decades. Sometimes, images are blurred and overlaid as densely as the chaos of musical fragments and creaking sonic whatsits in Joseph Field Eccles and Nick Smyth’s own sound design. The film may offer up some absurdist comedy at the expense of Jim’s dedication to his craft, but ultimately shares in his possessed creative energy.
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