The Peril at Pincer Point shows an aspiring young sound designer willing to go completely off the deep end in the name of cinematic ingenuity. And in their memorable Bananas debut as a duo, one suspects that writer-directors Jake Coon and Noah Stratton-Twain have done the same. Whether it’s satire or an ode to unrealistically bold independent filmmaking, this micro-budget curio, in its dirty, scuffed jacket, cobbles together influences from Powell and Pressburger to grimy folk horror to the indie postmodernism of Mark Jenkin and Peter Strickland, yet still maintains its own twisted, strange voice.
The Peril at Pincer Point, which recently premiered in the Vision section of this year’s SXSW program and won the Neon Writer’s Award, may prove to be too outlandish a prospect for many distributors. But the event has a special streak of inspired madness that could build a cult following if both its quirky charm and considerable official interest spread through the festival circuit. As visually and aurally rich as you’d expect from a film about hardcore artistry at its core, the film promises, if not immediately bigger things, then at least something even more elaborate and weird from Kuhn and Stratton-Twain. The latter is also a film editor and composer, making his solo feature debut with last year’s comedy Two Big Feet. For the former, this is a first-year effort.
Both directors have made several short films of their own, and “The Peril at Pincer Point” shows that they are still getting used to the format. With its sparse storytelling and opulent atmosphere, this 83-minute feature at times feels like a short story (or, really, a joke) that stretches beyond its intended length, as the protagonist’s quest for his apparent destiny crab-walks in circles toward the inevitable punchline of madness. But for those on this film’s wavelength, the completely looped beauty of the vision here is oddly evocative. Its cryptic sonic textures invite viewers to lean in and catch hidden whispers, while it becomes increasingly difficult to look away from its grainy, stormy black-and-white images.
The unstoppable nature of the proceedings is pre-established on screen by an obviously fabricated quotation from a book purportedly written in hut-style poetry entitled “Contemplations of Telson and Other Elegies.” “We may be in a parallel reality, but it’s a richly detailed and footnoted reality.” Jim (Jack Redmayne), a young man living in London, improbably witnesses a crab crawling across the floor of his high-rise apartment, and is awakened by his girlfriend’s screams. Trying to catch the beast, he gets caught in its claws and suffers a wound that is eerily slow to heal.
Coincidence or not, this out-of-place sighting is tied to a project Jim is currently working on. The project is a demented human-crustacean romance in the style of a swooning Golden Age melodrama, helmed by domineering and conceited B-movie writer P.W. Griffin (Os Riens). Unsatisfied with what he heard in the early cuts, Griffin wanted no pressure and just a sound mix that was “unprecedented in the history of cinema” and sent Barking Jim to the remote British island of Pincer Point, where the film was shot, to record new material.
In particular, Griffin wants to record the voice of a local woman who was recently found missing when Jim arrives in this sleepy but sinister community. Everyone he meets doesn’t really care, except for Salty Seadog (Mike McKenzie) at a local pub (amusingly named “Fat Plankton”), who tells a lofty story about a ghost ship captain collecting souls from the living for his crew. Jim is more alarmed by this than by the sight of a dog-sized crab in his bedroom, or by a hallucination in which he seems to have acquired ears that can understand the sounds of shellfish. Either way, the more Griffin gets used to his strange new surroundings, the more satisfied he becomes with the recordings. Perfection invites, but so does emptiness.
Redmayne brings a gentle, sleepy, folksy energy to this increasingly off-kilter affair, and much of the dialogue between him and his co-stars (including Stratton-Twain, who plays the missing woman’s slacker brother) is improvised in a jarringly hairy way. But “Pincer Crisis” is no haphazard filmmaking prank. Cinematographer Murray Zev Cohen’s black-and-white compositions are tortured in a way that recalls the very school of low-budget films of the past, or reels left in archives for decades. At times, the images are blurry and layered as tightly as the chaos of musical snippets and creaks present in Joseph Field Eccles and Nick Smith’s own sound design. The film may offer absurdist comedy in exchange for Jim’s dedication to his art, but it ends up sharing his creative energy.
