Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jake Kuhn, Noah Stratton-Twine
Starring: Jack Redmayne, Alyth Ross, Os Leanse, Mike Mackenzie, Dashiell Upton
Writer/directors Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine's oddity The Peril at Pincer Point follows movies like Brian de Palma's Blowout and Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio in presenting us with a sound recordist protagonist driven mad by their quest to capture the perfect sound effect. There is also a nod to Jerzy Skolimowski's The Shout in the notion that there exists a sound that spells doom for anyone whose ears are exposed to it.
Tonally however, The Peril at Pincer Point couldn't diverge any further from those dark thrillers. We're firmly in the realm of a very droll British brand of absurdist comedy here. Kuhn and Stratton-Twine's first collaboration owes more to small screen comedy shows like The League of Gentlemen and The Mighty Boosh.
Our anti-hero here is Jim (Jack Redmayne), a struggling film sound recordist whose elevated sense of self worth takes a battering when tyrannical director PW Griffin (Os Leanse) blames his shoddy work for ruining his latest film. Griffin sends Jim to Pincer Point, the remote island where the film was shot, with orders to capture a sound that has never featured in any other movie and also to record a voiceover from local woman Marina (Alyth Ross).
In classic Wicker Man fashion, Jim discovers that the island is populated by hostile eccentrics and that Marina has been missing for two weeks. None of the locals seem all that bothered by Marina's disappearance, including her brother Hollis (Stratton-Twine), who puts Jim up at his home. Jim learns of a local legend of a ghost ship that abducts the island's young people, and the natives have resigned themselves to the idea that this is Marina's fate. Learning that the spectral ship emits a noise unlike any other, Jim becomes determined to capture the sound.
The setup is straight out of a '70s folk-horror, but the movie plays it for laughs. The trouble is The Peril at Pincer Point is never as amusing as it seems to believe it is. Most of the dialogue appears to have been improvised, and it often plays like the film is making up its plot on the fly. Kuhn and Stratton-Twine dedicate their film to Roger Corman, and giant crab monsters play a role in the plot, but Corman would likely be left aghast at the loose improv structure.
What the filmmakers have taken from the king of the Bs is an ability to get bang for their buck with an intriguing setting and some clever effects and production design on a low budget. Shot in academy ratio black and white, The Peril at Pincer Point simultaneously evokes the paper mache approach of '50s b-movies and the style of the silent era. Visually, the film has a welcoming dreamlike atmosphere that sometimes evokes the rustic aesthetic of Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin, but this is interrupted whenever the movie requires a dialogue scene to explain its plot. It's at this point that it all feels a bit BBC3. Comedy is subjective, and this sort of improv absurdism is far from everyone's cup of chowder. As much as I appreciated the filmmakers' DIY moxie and their dedication to a specific vision, I ultimately came away with the feeling that The Peril at Pincer Point is a movie that was probably more fun to make than watch.
