SXSW Review: “The Peril at Pincer Point”

Тhe Peril at Pincer Point (Jake Kuhn/Noah Stratton-Twine, 2026) 3½ out of 5 stars

It’s the strangeness of it all that makes The Peril at Pincer Point work. From the opening scene where a crab mysteriously appears in a London apartment to the choice of an overly eager movie sound recordist as protagonist to the hodgepodge design of the remote, titular island, and so much more, directors Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine (Two Big Feet) craft a layered mystery that would make the late Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson proud. If the plot details sometimes stumble the one upon the other and the net result remains enigmatic, like a ship in the night (of which there is one), they leave a more lasting impression than such transitory encounters often do.

Jim Baitte (Jack Redmayne, Two Big Feet) has messed up badly. The recorded sounds he has turned in for his latest job are deemed garbage by the director and producers, nothing more than reworked versions of what he did for his last project, Frogopolis. They are not happy. But fear not, young Jim, for redemption is at hand. The director, P.W. Griffin (Os Leanse)—a bit of a tyrant, but with a historically evocative name like that, how could he not be?—orders our hero off to “Pincer Point,” a distant island somewhere off the coast of somewhere where Jim is to find a barmaid with a perfect voice who will record the voiceover to solve all their problems.

The hitch? Once upon the island—which has tropical trees but European ruins—Jim finds that the woman, Marina, is missing, and no one knows where nor seems to care that much (not even her brother, played by Stratton-Twine). Still, there are plenty of other sounds to collect, including from local old-timer Erasmus (Michael Mackenzie), whose speech patterns recall every movie pirate ever. Throw in some variants of “arrr,” “matey,” and “ahoy” and he could double for Robert Newton in the 1950 Treasure Island.

Unfortunately, there also more crabs, who seem to fancy Jim and, possibly, speak to him. They’re big, too. And rumor has it that by staying on Pincer Point, Jim is courting trouble, for “Captain Sye Telson” (a ghost, local legend, or both) likes the young ‘uns, particularly strong-willed souls, and could press him into service for 10,000 years should he catch him. That is ostensibly what happened to Marina. But in the meantime, P.W. Griffin is digging the sounds that Jim continues to send back. They will make the movie, he says. They certainly drive the plot of this one.

“Fer every fish be a lad holdin’ harpoon, fer every chowder be a lad holdin’ spoon, and fer every sound be a lad holdin’ boom.” That quote, apparently from Telson, opens The Peril at Pincer Point, and when we add the expressive high-contrast black-and-white images, the carefully crafted visual effects, and increasingly odd developments of the screenplay, the result comes across as either a hallucination or a dream, or something in between. It’s not a bad feeling. Ahoy there, matey; come aboard and sail away. You might just have a lot of fun.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.