THE STORY – On a quest to prove his competency, an inept sound recordist finds himself entangled in a nautical prophecy on the spectral island of Pincer Point.
THE CAST – Jack Redmayne, Alyth Ross, Os Leanse, Heidi Parsons & Mike Mackenzie
THE TEAM – Jake Kuhn & Noah Stratton-Twine (Directors/Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 83 Minutes
Directed by Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine and screening at the Fantasia International Film Festival, “The Peril at Pincer Point” captures your attention immediately with its black-and-white visuals shot on film. But this initial transfixion is broken by a woman screaming. We’re in an apartment; she’s spotted a mouse. Jim, her boyfriend, goes to grab it and finds a crab instead. “We’re nowhere near the sea,” he says, just before its pincer finds his finger. How is there a crab in a thirty-story London building? It’s quite a journey to get an answer, but one that spins a modern pirate tale.
The scene shifts into what looks like a classic film clip of a woman falling in love with a man turned crab. Jim (Jack Redmayne) is the sound recordist on the film. He and his colleagues watch his latest work, which they think sounds sloppy because he reused sound from other projects. To those around him, Jim seems lazy and rudderless, and his job is on the line. The film’s director, the tyrannical B-movie auteur P.W. Griffin (Os Leanse), makes a surprise visit. He’s an artist with an impossible vision, and Jim’s colleagues are eager to let him take the fall for the boss’s displeasure.
Griffin exiles Jim to an island called Pincer Point, where he must record the perfect sound mix and, somewhat ridiculously, track down the voice of a catering employee whose timbre has lodged in the director’s head as the ideal narrator. On his way there, people keep telling Jim he sounds like a sailor chasing sirens, a comparison he can’t yet understand. He takes a ferry, arriving at a place that feels both real and entirely invented – a lonely “Widow’s Bay” atmosphere baked in lore and mystery hanging over the island.
When he arrives, he heads into what sounds like a rowdy bar full of locals from the outside, but inside it is empty. There’s just a girl at the bar (Heidi Parsons) telling him he only heard fishermen’s voices carried on the wind. It’s a small, unsettling moment that sets the tone for what follows: the missing woman he’s sent to record, whom nobody on the island seems concerned about; the lowly sailor who warns him about Captain Sye Telson, said to take the souls of the ambitious young; the previous sound recordist who went to Pincer Point and never returned, now appearing to Jim as a ghost recounting how he lost his soul like a doomed pirate. It plays like an old maritime legend rebuilt with modern sensibility.
The wounds from that first crab pinch aren’t healing. If anything, they’re worsening, but Jim still won’t leave the island, more worried about his job than his safety. He keeps recording — birds, wind through leaves, pebbles falling, and eventually the sound of crabs scuttling, which the islanders tell him to catch himself. When he finally does, he can hear them talk, like something from legend. Later, a storm rolls in, lightning splits over the beach, and he finds a woman (Alyth Ross as Marina) lying there, shot to look like an apparition. The film conjures a pulsing, heartbeat-like radiance around her that’s genuinely striking. Her monologue builds to the “ultimate sound” Griffin wants: the plea of a hundred thousand sea spirits. Jim, chasing a past success he hasn’t been able to repeat, starts to believe capturing it will finally make his career — never mind that the woman tells him to give up that ambition, that he already carries the mark for Telson to claim.
What makes “The Peril at Pincer Point” more than a curiosity is how self-aware it is about its own strangeness. Even when the plot starts to wander, you stay locked in, curious what it will conjure next. However, the film leans on atmosphere to do emotional work its script lacks through thin characters, even as it excels at the craft. It does conjure something that feels like old pirate lore filtered through a contemporary sense of doom, with a creativity that even big-budget Hollywood doesn’t touch. The sets and cinematography are so well done it makes you wonder how some of it was pulled off on what was clearly not a studio budget. There are stretches where the film feels like it is chasing too many ideas at once, but even those sprawling patches stay within the same folkloric mood, and you can’t help wanting to get swallowed up in it.
