‘The Peril at Pincer Point’ Review: Gorgeous, Handmade Horror-Comedy [Fantasia 2026]

The Peril at Pincer Point, written and directed by Noah Stratton-Twine and Jake Kuhn, is dedicated more than once to the late, great King of Exploitation Cinema, Roger Corman. In some ways, the reason for this is quite obvious. This is a scrappy, independent production (one of the stars also served as driver for the cast and crew), made with few resources and a lot of creativity, and built around an admiration for classic monster movies. All of these things are Corman hallmarks, things that made him an icon of independent filmmaking.

But there’s more at work here than simply trying to ape Corman’s from-the-hip style. It’s more of an ethos than a visual or narrative blueprint, the sense that you can always make something special with very little, if you’ve got the determination and the creativity, and Pincer Point has that in spades. Though Corman is its spiritual father, this is a film that puts its own singular stamp on the landscape of independent genre filmmaking now, a beautiful, dreamy, earnest blend of horror, comedy, and good old-fashioned British weird that’s one of the best things I’ve seen all year.

Jim (Jack Redmayne) is a sound recordist working in the early 2000s British cinema scene whose work has seen better days. He’s coasting on past successes, cutting corners with his work, and his bosses have started to notice. Fortunately for Jim, he catches a break when a tyrannical director decides he needs an intrepid recordist to head back out to a location to capture a specific woman’s voice. The location? Pincer Point, a secluded island where technology hasn’t advanced past payphone boxes, the locals have their own way of doing things, and the woman Jim’s looking for is…well, hard to find.

Fearful that he’ll lose his entire career if he admits defeat and simply goes home without finding his subject, Jim sticks around, recording old fishermen’s tales of a legendary ghostly ship that marks its victims through crab bites and then transforms them into ageless crustaceans. The more he explores the island, though, the more Jim starts to wonder if the old stories have a ring of truth, particularly when he hears what sounds like the voices of old sailors on the wind, warning him to turn back.

Much of the Corman influence in the film lies in its independent spirit and ingenuity, but there are also, of course, visual similarities as well, particularly in Corman’s early black-and-white efforts like Attack of the Crab Monsters and, of course, the offbeat humor of The Little Shop of Horrors. But while the influences might begin there, it’s certainly not where they end. The grainy, black-and-white, Academy ratio visuals conjured by Stratton-Twine, Kuhn, and cinematographer Murray Zev Cohen evoke everything from the dreamscapes of Powell and Pressburger to the haunting shades of Carl Theodor Dreyer to more recent successes like Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse.

Armed with miniatures, CGI, and seaside compositions that look like living paintings, the filmmakers deliver everything from an island where every rock seems shaped like a crustacean’s claw to a glowing, mysterious woman who washes up in the surf. It’s like stepping into another world adjacent to our own.

And that otherworldly sensibility is helped along by a glorious sound design job masterminded by Joseph Eccles and Nick Smyth. Sound is crucial to the film, of course, since it’s the story of a recordist and sound designer, and it matters not just in an aural sense but in a thematic one. What begins as a desperate attempt to keep his job and get his career back on track soon becomes a journey of obsession for Jim.

Phantom sounds harry him, some of them funny and others quite creepy, until he gets lost in the recurring patterns of them, the sense that themes are building, that he’s trapped in a musical composition in which he is but one voice. The film further emphasizes the importance of sound by rarely moving the camera, focusing instead on the ways in which movement in the frame (something that’s both an old-school Western cinema tradition and one turned into high art by Japanese directors like Ozu and Kurosawa) and the wash of sound over an image can generate emotion.

It falls to Redmayne to carry much of that emotion, and he gives a performance that feels both intensely natural and just absurd enough to fit into this otherworldly seascape. There’s an improvisational feel – and indeed, the credits nod to the cast for improvising beyond the script – to the dialogue in The Peril at Pincer Point, another nod to Corman and his need to just get on with takes and keep shooting, that reflects the independent spirit of the movie, but also gives us insight into the way the characters work.

Jim, for all of his experience and the industry clout he uses as a crutch, has no idea what he’s doing. He’s wandered, in every way that matters, off the creative map and into uncharted territory. He’s fumbling in the dark for something with a meaningful shape, and the dialogue and performances capture that feeling. I wouldn’t call this movie particularly frightening in a visceral way, but it is wonderfully unsettling, and a big part of that comes from the way Redmayne’s able to play Jim as a guy whose true purpose is slowly dawning on him.

The Peril at Pincer Point begins by styling itself as a meta-monster movie, and while it keeps that tone throughout, its greater achievement, beyond the visual dazzle and the evocative soundscape, is in the way it depicts creativity as an act of intense, obsessive faith. Like Corman, these filmmakers had to believe in what they were doing long enough to see it through, scraping and clawing (crab pun absolutely intended) their way to something with real meaning. The horror elements of the film suggest that sometimes this meaning we find is more than we can handle, but the overall vision is one which tells us that the search, however arduous, is always worth it.

Every once in a while you need a movie that gets you excited not just about movies, but about the pure organic joy of creativity all over again. The Peril at Pincer Point is one of those movies, an indie gem with a handmade heart, a folk-horror mind, and a Cormanesque soul.

The Peril of Pincher Point screened at the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival. Release info TBD.