★★★★☆
Like Guy Maddin meeting The Mighty Boosh on a monochrome island of pirates, prophecy… and an awful lot of crabs.
Shot in silvery monochrome and pitched at total deadpan, Noah Stratton-Twine and Jake Kuhn’s B-movie pastiche is a quintessentially British oddity, the sort of thing that could only come from a sensibility raised on late-night telly and half-remembered comics annuals. Sound recordist Jim Baitte is drawn into an island mystery involving pirates, an ominous prophecy and a great many crabs, and the film treats its own daftness with a beautifully straight face.
It reminded me of both Guy Maddin’s fetish for silent-era texture and the fever-logic whimsy of The Mighty Boosh, with a streak of The Lighthouse too, Eggers on strong weed if you like, in the way the salt-and-brine black-and-white slides into something stranger – and perhaps reminiscent of best of the old Comic Book Presents specials, that particular British knack for letting the eerie and the silly share a frame.
Even at 83 minutes the pacing does drag in patches; there’s a leaner, tighter hour lurking inside the feature. But that’s a quibble about a film with a texture all its own, and that kind of singularity is rare enough to prize. If your ideal Friday-night fantasia comes with a fog machine, a knowing wink and a bucket of crustaceans, this will do very nicely.
The Peril at Pincer Point played at Tubi FrightFest in London.