SXSW FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW! Production logos, whether flickering in dead silence or to the sweet opening notes of a movie’s score, are often the best thing about going to the pictures. So cool. So when a tiny independent film opens with a long succession of moody logos that would suit a Christopher Nolan co-production, while it might risk making the budget fun suffer the comparison, it’s enjoyably luscious.
And this is something the writers and directors (Jake Kuhn & Noah Stratton-Twine) of The Peril at Pincer Point certainly seem to understand. They kick off their fun and mysterious coastal horror/comedy with spiffing logos, then seem to accidentally comment on them in a roundabout way, by staging a raging argument in a postage-stamp-sized production booth in an opening scene. The creatives squabbling over their mastery of ‘plugins’ have the sordid energy of a phantom zone packed with Clem Fandangos. They’re all very obnoxious and funny.
Quaking outside the booth sits our protagonist, young sound man Jim Baitte (an endlessly watchable Jack Redmayne), whose supposedly substandard work has provoked this crisis. Crazed, legendary film director ‘PW’ Griffin despises the work Jim has turned in for his crab-focused magnum opus, so he is dispatched to a vaguely Lovecraftian remote coastal town to re-record PW’s masterpiece.
“there is a ghost ship lurking out to sea. And this ship’s siren call … is supposedly the most indescribably beautiful sound in the world”
Jim is initially tasked with finding Marina Hurley (Alyth Ross), a waitress whose voice haunts PW. But the girl has gone missing, and Jim instead catches wind from a salty sea dog in the local boozer (a genuinely eerie Andrew Upton) that there is a ghost ship lurking out to sea. And this ship’s siren call when it claims new crewmen for its ten thousand years of service is supposedly the most indescribably beautiful sound in the world. Now, obsessed with furthering his career, the gormless Jim sets out to record this exotic nugget no matter the cost.
It’s hard to imagine anyone who would not like this film. It’s a good comedy from England. If you’ve seen any of the old The Comic Strip Presents… or The Mighty Boosh TV shows from the UK, then this has a similar ensemble energy to it.
